2010 Alaska Wildlands Calendar

I have tried to keep the shameless self promotion to a minimum, but I have always kinda liked this photo of Harriman Glacier in the Chugach National Forest, so I was excited to have it selected for the cover of next years calendar.

I believe these are available at most National Park visitor centers in Alaska.  Here are some more Chugach National Forest photos.

Welcome to Las Vegas sign, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sorry to disappoint – I don’t have some crazy story about a late night last night!

You see, on June 5th, Warner Bros. is releasing a major motion picture with that name.  Like with most movie releases, the actors perform endless promotional interviews telling everyone just how funny the movie is, and how awesome everyone got along during filming.  But unlike most motion pictures, this time, the actors will be doing their interviews while sitting in front of a collage of Las Vegas photos, including our above photo of the Las Vegas sign!  I think that is pretty cool. 

Hopefully it works out better for them then Viva Laughlin!

This year, I'm very excited to report that we have the cover image for all three Bell's Travel Guides!

In my last post, in response to a question I shared information about our top grossing photos.  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the above photo.  The boxing bear cub image you see on this travel guide hasn’t been used in an advertising campaign, this kept it off the top grossing list, but in terms of total number of sales, it has to be our most popular image.  

These guys are so cute, it is easy to understand why.  Not only has this image appeared on travel guides, in calendars and on post cards, but it receives a fair amount of attention on the internet as well.  In just over a year, it has been viewed by over 100,000 people on flickr!

This photo was captured in early spring of 2005 in Denali National Park.  The weather was clear, so we got up well before sunrise, probably about 3:00 a.m., and started driving across the Park with the hope of capturing Denali “the mountain” at sunrise.  I hadn’t seen spring cubs in Denali for years, and research reports from the Park confirmed for two years in a row spring cubs had not been spotted anywhere in the Park.  That just added to my surprise as we drove around a corner near Polychrome Pass and spotted a sow with three spring cubs right in the middle of the road!

I immediately turned the engine off, rolled down the window and began photographing.  The bear cubs were so fun to watch!  The bears actually walked down the road towards us a bit and got fairly close, before turning around and heading back up the road.  After walking a short distance, the bears left the road into the thick vegetation leaving us with goose bumps and huge smiles!  We watched for the cubs the rest of the trip, but never did see them again.

Cover of the Kenai Peninsula Tourism Marketing Council Travel Guide (KPTMC), Alaska.

This is actually a composite of two of our images combined by KPTMC.  You see, they really liked this photo from Harriman Fiord in Prince William Sound.  Problem was, even though it looked like it could have been captured in Kenai Fjords on the Kenai Peninsula, savvy viewers would certainly recognize this as part of Prince William Sound which is outside the Kenai Peninsula.  So they replaced the background with an image of ours from Kenai Fjords.  They did such a good job that when this arrived last week, I forgot it was a composite – it even fooled me!

A self portrait from a solo backpacking trip along the Harding Icefied, Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska

 Well I’m sure that title got your attention, and my friends are probably laughing and rolling their eyes – I better quickly explain.

Evidently, CBS has a daytime TV show entitled The Bold and Beautiful.  It was explained to us that one of the characters on the show is this guy who does a lot of adventure travel.  Well, CBS contacted us last week and purchased 7 prints of adventure activities to decorate the set that will make up this characters office.  These pictures will appear to be personal photos of the character during his travels and adventures.  The photo of me above is one of the seven.  So star is a big exaggeration – but someday, somewhere, a photo of me just might be visible on the Bold and Beautiful.  lol

It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then we get a request in which we know we have the perfect photo – like for this book!

This is a publication of “True Tales to make you Laugh, Chortle, Snicker and Feel Inspired”.  I haven’t had a chance to read the whole book yet, but I just sat down and read one of the first stories: To Alaska (Without Pants).  It was hilarious!  I now look forward to reading the rest of the stories!

This is pretty exciting – this image is on the cover of a couple different versions of AAA’s magazine Via, including the Mountain West and Oregon editions.  We have a series of photos to go along with the story about Southeast Alaska on the inside as well.

Long time subscribers might remember when I captured this image from this post on the Skagway Railroad.

Now that we are home and going through our mail I may subject you to a bit more shameless self promotion.

We found these teepees driving around the backroads of Moab this Fall.

Here are some random news items that I thought I would share.  Since these aren’t interesting to most readers, I figured I would put them all in one post and bury them after the jump.

Our bison in Yellowstone is in the current (December) issue of Outdoor Photographer!  We were in Moab when they contacted us, and at the time we didn’t ask how they intended to use the image.  Now I see it accompanies an article by Jim Goldstein .  That was a cool honor - I have known Jim through the internet – we have emailed and talked on the phone, I look forward to meeting him in person one day.

Over the last couple of years we have been fortunate to spend extended amounts of time in a number of wonderful places – Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Zion in addition to the Phoenix, San Diego and Las Vegas areas.  Fortunately, these places have sold well for us making it easier to return, with one major exception;  Anza Borrego State Park. 

I shouldn’t be surprised, it seems like we rarely come across a person who has even heard of Anza Borrego.  We have come across people just an hour and a half away in Palm Springs who give us that same funny look when I tell them we are going to Anza Borrego.  They look as if you aren’t even using real words.  But, the lack of popularity is probably why we enjoy the area.  Well recently, we have had a flurry of activity with our Anza Borrego photos, with the most notable being an upcoming issue of National Geographic Adventure.

We have also received some nice recognition from a few blogs during recent months.  It is always nice to be recognized by the big players in the photography industry as we were in this entry on the Photoshelter blog. 

The Digital Railroad blog referred to images of ours in which they had sold on numerous occasions.  The writer of that blog paid us the ultimate compliment when he selected one of my photos as his all time favorite!  I would link to it, but it wasn’t long after that, that Digital Railroad went bankrupt.  I hope that didn’t have anything to do with their taste in photography. 

Chugach National Forest Guide

Here is another cover I hadn’t had a chance to share.  I think the Chugach National Forest is an amazing region that rivals most National Parks in beauty and diversity.

Ulysses Travel Guide

Now that we are back home, you may be subjected to a little bit of shameless self promotion.   

This is the cover of a French version of a new Ulysses Travel Guide for the Western United States.  This is a bend in the Colorado River near Page, Arizona.

Sunset Magazine cover, October, 2008.

 This just arrived in the mail a few minutes ago, and I gotta admit, it is a really cool to have the cover of a magazine like Sunset! 

We had two Zion images being considered as finalist for this cover, the other one was this image of Temple of Sinawava in Zion.  That photo ended up being used as a full page in this months issue of Via Magazine – so now both photos are happy!

Here are more Zion National Park photos.

Like yesterday’s image, the above poster was also part of the market test in LA; here is my original post and photo on that story.  The image was from the Hidden Falls Trail in Grand Teton last year at this time.

So it is really exciting to report this image was also licensed for unlimited nationwide bus stop signage for one year, along with some other uses!

You might notice the version that illustrates the blog entry on the Hidden Falls Trail is darker then the one you see above.  That is because images used in this blog are usually from the a jpeg with very little Photoshop adjustment applied, because I’m in the field and short on time.  In this case, the final version was actually a blending of two different exposures created by working with the raw files after returning home.  I always capture both a jpeg and raw file when taking a photo – This blog is the only place I use the jpeg; otherwise I only work with the raw file. 

Last winter I shared the original version of this photo in my Seward comes to Los Angeles post, and talked about how it was going to appear on billboards in the Los Angeles area over a 12 week period – this is how the actual billboard looked.

What I didn’t know; this was a test market, and fortunately the test went well.  So now Nature Valley and their ad agency liscended the image for unlimited billboard use nationwide for one year!  It will appear primarily in hispanic markets in major cities across the U.S.  Pretty cool.

American Road cover. 

This image has been on a bit of a roll lately by also appearing on the cover of this year’s The Milepost.

This photo was from our trip to San Diego a little over a year ago.

Magazines and books often select more then one photo to mock up for cover consideration.  We had been on a bit of a losing streak lately missing out on what could have been exciting covers for National Geographic Adventure and Via Magazine.  Maybe now our luck is changing!

I think I posted this photo on the blog last October the day after I captured it – well this month it is on the cover of Fort Wayne Living!  Here are more of our Las Vegas photos.

Well I haven’t subjected you to my shameless self promotion in awhile, but this one is too excited to pass up.  For the second year in a row I have a photo on the cover of The Milepost! 

As I wrote last year, this is a special cover for me, as I remember growing up, every traveler through Glennallen carried a copy of this extremely valuable travel guide.  To this day, I still make sure I have the current Milepost with me as I travel around Alaska and Canada as it has detailed mile by mile descriptions of anything you may encounter – not only the mountains and rivers, but the restaurants and campgrounds as well.  If you are driving to Alaska, you must have the latest copy of The Milepost!

The photo was taken in late September at Tern Lake, part of the Chugach National Forest, about 35 miles out the Seward Highway from Seward.  Wait a second, a quick peak at The Milepost tells me this lake is 37.2 miles from Seward.

Hidden Falls, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

This photo is also part of the Nature Valley ad campaign for Los Angeles and Orange County, California - this image will be appearing on bus shelters in the area over the next couple of months.

You might remember this images from last summer, it was from the Hidden Falls Trail in the Grand Tetons.

This image was captured within the city limits of Seward, Alaska – looking out at Mt. Alice and the Chugach National Forest.

If you are in Los Angeles or Orange County, California over the next 12 weeks, you might see this image on a billboard promoting Nature Valley products.  Pretty cool!

If you have followed this blog for long, you will remember the wonderful time we spent around the Grand Tetons this past June.  It is nice to have images from that trip already in print – from pond to print in less then 6 months! 

This is one of the advantages of digital.  During the days of shooting slides, a trip like the one we took to the desert southwest last winter would just now be making it to market.  With digital, that trip paid for itself within just a few months!

These trips may pay for themselves quicker, but they won’t begin to pay for any of the homes in this catalog!

Here you can read more about our travels to the Grand Tetons on the photo blog.