The wet autumn season in Alaska has coughed up only a few clear sky days. My nine day stint in Denali Park during Aug/Sept saw many dark gray clouds and rain. However, there were a few moments of brilliance, with an emphasis on the “few”. The fall colors in the park were magnificent, vibrant and almost painful to look at. They don’t last long however, in Alaska’s short autumn season. I’ll be sharing some images from that journey in the upcoming days. I’ll start with this shot, my only morning session with the big mountain known as Mt McKinley or Denali, (the Great One).

I know its been shot a million times, and I myself have many in my collection. It still is a lure however, and has a face that changes continually. I particularly like the low-lying fog over the lake, which is a common phenomenon when the air temp is cooler than the water temp. The trumpeter swan and ducks in the foreground offer a interesting wildlife element to the scene, but they also destroy the flat calm water and mess up a reflection. I waited until they wandered further away from me and the ripples dissipated for a more clear reflection. When I first arrived, it was flat calm and the swan was resting on the shore, but the morning light had not yet tipped the mountain. And, as the story goes, when the light came, the birds went swimming.

I used the 70-200mm f/4L IS, and made sure to turn off the Image Stabilization for an exposure as slow as 1/4 second. Failure to do so can introduce IS blur. The low contrast, pastel colors are a pleasing combination.

I watched the summit of Mt McKinley (Denali) slowly clear off one evening in Denali National Park, while the lower portion was still enshrouded in clouds. So I set my telephoto lens up on a tripod and thought I’d shoot the summits. Many are not aware that there are two summits to the mountain, the north summit, 19,470 feet (5,934 m) and the south summit, which is the highest one, 20,320 feet (6,194 m)–on the left in this picture.  I found the clouds intriguing as they slowly dissipated, and watched it for a while, took my camera off the tripod and got ready to move on when I noticed the tiny flightseeing plane approaching the mountain. I grabbed my camera, quickly composed and shot a series of the plane moving across the peak. I had been on manual mode so I knew the exposure was dead on, but my shutter speed was on the low side at 1/160 sec. Fortunately, that was enough to stop the plane at that distance. I have flown around that mountain with the doors off doing aerials in the past, but this perspective of flightseeing is a new view to me.  Below is a single frame from the panorama series. What a sense of scale!!

It can be a challenge to photograph in the late morning on a sunny day. The light gets hot and harsh. However on this morning, the sunny foreground was complimented by some dramatic cloud action in the distance and the perpendicular lighting, although contrasty, made for some drama in lighting. At 10:30 am, this bull moose was still wading and feeding in a tundra pond. If you are familiar with this region, you will know that Mt. McKinley is to the right, but it was clouded over. And, even if it was visible (a bull moose and Mt. McKinley is a sought after shot) it would not have been as interesting from a light perspective. I’ve always been fond of the contextual shots of wildlife in a broad landscape setting, and I particularly like the dramatic light and clouds in this frame.

I photographed a lot of bull moose during my trip in Denali last week. It is a subject I have extensive coverage of, but not much imagery of large bull moose still in velvet antlers, so I was pleased to acquire some pictures of that stage of development. Soon, the bulls will be losing the velvet and preparing for the mating season. I’ll be back in Denali National Park for that later in the month and look forward to the splendid fall colors that will carpet that wonderful landscape.

Photo gallery from my July 2010 float trip down the Marsh Fork of the Canning River, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Contrary to what many non-photographers think, the bluebird day, cloudless skies are generally not welcomed by the landscape photographer-not me anyway. They might ensure first and last light upon the land, but there is little art in the sky without some shapes and lines offered by broken clouds moving dynamically overhead. It is these latter conditions that attract me most. It may require waiting around for a while until the light spills in the right spot, but it renders a landscape of continual change.

When traveling through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in July, it rained 9 out of 11 days, and a few of those were thick and gray. Most days had a little sunshine however and the clouds that formed offered some good photography opportunities.

The dynamic range can present a challenge in these scenes and in some cases, especially when the sun is included in the picture, I will blend two exposures to manage tonal values (as well as lens flare management). I rarely do “Merge to High Dynamic Range” or HDR blends in Photoshop, but sometimes they can work well. In general, I find them a little on the edge of realism. Not that I don’t like them or find good use in that method of handling dynamic range, just a preference of mine. Whenever possible, even with the use of a split graduated neutral density filter (which is often obvious) I try to present an image that looks somewhat realistic to what the eye would see. This is not always perfectly achieved, but it is a generalized goal in my work.

Here are 10 frames that accentuate the drama of some very cool clouds in the Brooks range of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All images below were processed in Lightroom 3 as single files, without blending or merging additional images.

On Sunday, July 25, my eyes slowly opened at 4:00 AM.  The temperature read 33 degrees. If you have spent any time in the outdoors in Alaska, such a chilly temperature in July is a telltale sign that the skies above are clear. I checked the sky (the first thing every landscape photographer does upon waking) to confirm this.  Within 5 minutes after waking, I was in motion.

The night before I gambled and chose to camp at the western end of Denali National Park, in hopes of some sunrise light on Denali.  Record high rainfall has fallen in Alaska’s interior during the month of July so I felt gifted by the clear morning.  But more specifically, I was anxious to see if the clearness overhead extended to that great massif rock called Mt. McKinley, or Denali, North America’s tallest mountain.

I have stood and looked at this mountain on countless mornings and evenings. While the mountain itself never changes, the light and clouds seem in perpetual transition and the visual variation still amazes me. The first thought and desire is to be at twenty different locations when skies are like this, but one has to commit for first light and I chose to stay at Wonder Lake, since the fog and mist over the water was intriguing. Sometimes, the alpenglow color is dramatic, but on this morn, although beautiful, it was not particularly colorful.

Three cameras were set up on tripods and I ran back and forth between them clicking shutters. I used the 16-35, 24-105 and 70-200 lenses on full frame cameras, with ISO set low, and importantly remembered to turn off the Image Stabilization. This is a critical factor when using slow shutter speeds since one can introduce blur when stabilization is turned on for exposures below 1/15 sec or so.

I shook some ice off my tripod legs and mused at the speed in which season’s move in this state.

On the final evening of my Marsh fork/Canning river trip in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, after a wild and windy storm squall of rain passed through, the skies cleared to the north and that long sought after golden summer sunshine poured across the landscape. The mosquitoes however, were abusive. After setting up camp in a pair of shorts that I had worn on the river all day, and doing a crazy mosquito dance for about 5 minutes, I dove into my tent and considered staying there for the night. But that buttery light, along with a hunger pang, lured me out quickly.

I used my bug shirt (a necessity for travel in this region), and while it makes photography a bit difficult looking through the mesh net, (especially shooting into the sun)  it offers the gift of relief. Managing bugs requires more than your own bug net however. The swarms were so bad that they crowded my camera and lens and were constantly in the picture. I resorted to using my 10 second self timer, then slowly backing away from the camera, luring the cloud with me so the actual shot would contain fewer bugs. It worked pretty effectively, although I still had to stamp out a few bugs that showed up as blur streaks in the picture.

We found the bull caribou antler along the river bank and threw it our raft to use as a photo prop along the way. But when the river rose overnight early on during the trip, it washed the antlers away. Fortunately, we found the same set of antlers downriver on our very last day of travel. Both of these frames are single exposures, although I shot a variety of images in which to blend for better dynamic range and detail management if necessary.

I spent 11 days in July floating the Marsh fork of the Canning river, which is one of the many rivers flowing north out of the Brooks Range and into the Beaufort Sea. The Canning river marks the western boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is substantial in size at 19 million acres. It seems that all ventures in Alaska’s arctic tap into the extremes that even mid summer can offer. One moment you are wearing every piece of clothing you brought, and the next moment you are baking in hot sun along a tundra hillside. Plenty of rain fell during the trip, and in a heartbreaking way, pumped the normally beautifully aqua blue river to bank busting brown. When you see water flowing through dwarf fireweed, then you know it is high water! I did most of the trip in a little pack raft, what amazingly fun little water wizards.

For a change of pace, when flying in we had our gear dropped off down river, and our pilot gave us GPS coordinates to find the goods. It was a mild 14 mile hike in clouds and rain and we arrived to enjoy a clearing evening and pleasant sunset (I take that back, the sun does not set, but it did dip behind a mountain). We spent a few days at this camp spot as a base for day hikes. About 2:00am, while sipping on some Black Box red wine around our campfire, a lemming dashed across the gravel bar in front of us and jumped right into the swiftly moving river. I thought…little guy…you are toast, that current will sweep you downstream in an instant. I was wrong. That amazing little animal paddled itself right across the current with amazing alacrity. I’ve been commercial fishing in big seas and the waves to that little guy must have been the equivalent of 30 footers!

I took an amazingly few photos on the 11 day journey, and barely dented the batteries of my camera. But there were a few nuggets along the way and I’ll share more in upcoming posts. This frame is a single RAW exposure and I used split-graduated ND filters in Lightroom to balance the foreground and sky tonality. I included the original flat, RAW capture to show what a pre and post Lightroom tweak looks like for this scene.

In June I spent 8 hours flying across the Brooks Range mountains in transit to specific locations for photography trips. While this time was transport-oriented and not dedicated to aerial photography, I was able to grab a few shots off along the way. I was in a de Havilland Beaver flown by Dirk Nickisch of Coyote Air. The front seat has a small sliding window that opens offering enough room for a lens to get a clear shot. While not perfect, it is a functional portal that permits some reasonable photography. My specific efforts at aerial photography last year were heavily thwarted by forest fire smoke so I was happy this year to see a little bit of rain (although a little too much on my last trip down the Canning river–posts on that coming soon). The immensity of the Brooks range and the seemingly unending rivers that flow out of the region is stunning. Here are a few shots I took in June.

This last June marked my second visit to the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska, a monstrous 23 million acre area on Alaska’s north slope. It was originally set aside by president Harding as an emergency oil supply for the US Navy.  The average person knows little about the region, and it is huge. Some consider it a large wasteland full of mosquitoes. Well, the mosquitoes love the place (at least for a month or two), but there is much more going on there. There are many stories I could tell about my recent trip in June, but it is time to move on to other subjects and I’ll leave behind this gallery for casual browsing. The photos were all taken in the Utukok river uplands region, which is referenced on a map on a previous post.