Category Archives: Gear & Technical

Information about the photography equipment and related technical aspects

100-400 with 1.4x? American Golden Plover – ANWR

During a raft trip down the Marsh Fork of the Canning river, a long day hike up into the mountains led me to some vociferous plovers that nest in the region. While I have a number of Plover photos that I consider better than this one, I did photograph the bird because of the specific...

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Elegant Paintbrush, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

I mentioned my trip into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a recent post, and I have a few more photos to share from that journey. In a land that exhibits dramatic and distant vistas, it is not surprising to find compelling subjects close at hand as well. While hiking along the Marsh Fork of...

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Bear Pepper Spray Essentials

I’ve had a canister of bear pepper spray for a long time and fortunately have never used it. Before replacing it with a new one, I decided to see what kind of spray range it retained. It functioned surprisingly well, although I did not test the efficacy of the solution. The new one came with...

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Wild wolfs, Denali National Park

As a follow up to my previous post “wolf pack kills moose calf” last week, in which a colleague and I photographed a predator/prey scene in Denali National Park, I thought I’d make a few comments on the photographic equipment and technical side of that shoot, and then share a few pictures taken following the...

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Ikelite or EWA Marine underwater hosuing

Perhaps there are some of you out there who have wondered about getting a housing for underwater, or over/under photography. I have used the ewa-marine U-BXP100 plastic bag housing for years, and decided to break into a system with more control, and therefore purchased the Ikelite housing for my Canon 5DII. I took the housing...

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Split Grad NDs & Dynamic Range

Sky control is fundamental to landscape photography. The term refers to ways in which a photographer manages the disparity in exposure values between the sky (which is often bright) and the foreground (which is often dark). The “balancing” is necessary because film can’t record the full range of tonal value (dynamic range) that the human...

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Lightroom and an Evolving Workflow

If you have been tracking the development of RAW image processing programs, then it should be getting increasingly more clear that the need to generate derivative .tiff or .psd files of your master RAW files is getting increasingly less necessary. In the beginning days of processing RAW files, it was cumbersome, slow, and in general...

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Going Underwater

It’s going on six weeks since I had shoulder surgery, and I have not taken one photo in Alaska in 2010. That is the longest photo-free period for me ever. However, that is happily ending as I’m pushing equatorial boundaries again for the second time in three months, with travels to Peru (Machu Picchu-if the...

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Aurora activity unfolding

Today on www.spaceweather.com there is a link to an interesting graph denoting the geomagnetic activity on a monthly basis. Spaceweather says: “Statistically speaking, March is the most geomagnetically active month of the year; October is a close second. Although the reasons why are not fully understood, there is no doubt that equinoxes favor auroras.” The...

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Sierra Club Calendar Submission

Its time for a Sierra Club Calendar Submission. I used to submit to them for many years when I shot film, but there was a huge gap in time for them to catch up to the digital world, and just last year they began accepting submissions of digital photography. While that was a big step...

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