I’m on vacation in the Virgin Islands. Yup, a rough life. Fairbanks was minus -30 degrees when I left, and even though I really like winter, the white sand and aqua water will be a fantastic break. A few photos in the making but nothing too serious. While I’m gone, I scheduled this post of a recent publication, and since it is a calendar, I thought it was a fitting picture to wish everyone a new year worthy of their expectations. May your 2012 be a rewarding year.

Panorama stitch I made from photos taken in Denali in August of 2011

Polar bear in Alaska's arctic

I found out that the new year started with one of the photos published in my new 2012 calendar “Alaska: Profiles in Nature“, was featured on the search website: www.bing.com. It was a polar bear picture that I took a few years ago in Alaska’s arctic. Pretty cool.

A few months ago I posted some cover options for my 2013 Wall Calendar, and many of you offered helpful comments and suggestions on design and layout. To say thank you, I’m offering a 20% savings on the 2012 Profiles in Nature wall calendar if purchased by December 16, 2011.

Orders can be placed through my website:

Enter this coupon for the discount: 2012profiles

Thanks again for your comments and contributions.

20% off through December 16, 2011 (Enter coupon: 2012profiles)

Once again, thanks to all of you who chimed in with your comments and suggestions. Below is the final version and the end of this post series – time to get back to other imagery. Final because it is time to move on to other pressing projects. Final because I think it is better than before. I did enlarge the image so the bears were bigger, which lost some of the variation in the clouds, which I think is a cool part of the entire image, but with all the text overlay you lose a lot of that anyway. It general, I think it is simpler, cleaner, stronger and more bold – fitting for both Alaska and the cover subjects. This will arrive in AK in early 2012 so it can reach markets for the summer tourist season. As for 2012, well that calendar, with a polar bear cover also, can be seen here.

To all of you who were so kind to comment and offer your feedback on the cover of my 2013 Alaska – Profiles in Nature calendar – a big thank you.

I have incorporated some of your suggestions and here is the new version. Of course, nothing is ever final until it goes off to press, but that won’t be too long from now.

I specifically cleaned it up, went with a much bolder font that better represents Alaska and is much more readable on a calendar stand in stores, and removed the black border and snowflakes.

Do you think it looks better?

After edits 2013 Calendar cover Before

When the day came that I was asked to plan more than one year ahead of time, I thought: something has gone wrong. But some things are inevitable. As it turns out, before I’ve really hit the sales period for the new calendar I released this year, it’s time to get the next one to the printer. So I’m wondering if I can get a little help from my friends here in selecting the cover.

The calendar includes images from across the state, with photographic comments about the process of getting the picture. It is a mix of landscape and wildlife imagery. These are two that I’m considering.

From the perspective of a calendar sitting on a shelf (with a lot of other ones!) which one do you think would be the most eye catching?

Vote for what you think would be the most appealing calendar cover.

Thanks for taking a moment to vote.

My new website is live: www.alaskaphotographics.com

Into the cloud

After many many months of work, my new website is finally live. So what did all the work involve? Mainly, it was editing 40,000 image files, sifting them for content relevance, age, and overall quality, spell check, adding headlines, and basic keyword restructure and QC (although the latter process is never finished!). I ended up with just over 20,000 files when I was done. This cut was in part due to redundancy, some to quality, and the rest to old and out of date, or more improved imagery acquired in the latter years.

In the transition to a new cloud-based service (www.photoshelter.com) I had to give up some of the custom features of my old site, and one that was hard to let go was the grouping or stacking feature. This let me edit loosely by grouping similar photos which enable a designer or graphic artist the flexibility of choosing from a particular scene that had some variation. As a stock photo site, and service, its important to offer designers empty space within a photo so their content can be added to the imagery. Of course, this has no appeal to someone looking for a print to hang on their wall, so serving both audiences, while at the same time delivering clean and uncluttered search results, is a challenge. I hopefully found a balance.

New print paper surface options

Some other great features of the new site are a wider and more diverse selection of paper surfaces for print buyers, including matt, luster, glossy and canvas. This, along with other photo related products (which I find mostly annoying and trinkety) but a few I included may have some utility.

WordPress plugins

PhotoShelter offers a few wordpress plugins, and the images in this post were added to the blog directly from my website via plug in, and they are linked back to the source file there, which saves a lot of copy, pasting and coding.

Buy and download stock photos online

For stock photo buyers, the option now exists to buy images on line and get an immediate link for downloading the hi-rez file. And the things I really like, which were lacking on my old site, is a bunch of stuff you don’t see. Its all the admin features that let me grant certain permissions to established photobuyers and clients. These features can be set quickly, wherever I am, not needing to be sourced from my office.

Kudos to PhotoShelter

There are many things I wish www.photoshelter.com offered, but that’s always the case, especially moving towards a template based system. But as one who typically scoffs at templates, I was able to tweak and moderately customize my site within the PhotoShleter framework to look very similar to my old site. I give the whole team at PhotoShelter a pretty good grade for an immense amount of forward thinking and organizational effort. The future will reveal if all of this will pay off.

Celebrating reduction

One thing I am celebrating…Two years ago I was managing two linux server computers, a print workstation, and two primary office workstations. I’m now down to one computer. And that is liberty to a true minimalist.

Some new galleries

You can check out my new website which has a few fun galleries I made including:

• The Best of Alaska
• Alaska Aerials
• Photographers Favorites

Thank You

And many thanks to all of you who passed on comments and feedback about the site, it was much appreciated.

My blogging life has been usurped by the inertia of my new website, finally moving into its final stage of going public. And that should happen in a few days or so. To the observer, the look has not changed greatly, but it operates under a completely different software. I’ve tried my best to replicate my old site in general structure and organization. Many of the features I’m excited about are back-end things that give me control of client access and file sharing.

I’ve never been one satisfied with templates, or packaged software, which is one reason I had my old site custom designed–along with the fact that there were no packaged photo software applications available when I started this. I’ll be giving up some much loved features of my old site, but gaining enough for me to make the switch. One thing that will be greatly celebrated is giving up the management and responsibility of my own server, with upgrades, blah, blah, stuff you don’t care about.

So, before this thing goes live, I invite you do a little test drive. Things should be pretty much in order, but I’ve got a few days of finalizing some small things. There might be a broken link out there, and if you find one, please let me know. And if you feel so inclined, I’d be happy to hear your comments. But please don’t tell me you liked my old site better or I’ll get depressed after spending months getting files prepped and coding established! Actually, you can tell me that, but I hope you don’t feel that way.

Click away:

The New AlaskaPhotoGraphics

My new website, going live in a few days

For those photographers out there who have your camera equipment insured, you might appreciate this little bit of economic redemption. Back in 2009 I took a remote river trip in Alaska’s arctic which turned out to be a magnificent venture on many counts, and it included some equipment casualties. My Canon 5D Mark II and 24-105 ended up swimming with me in the river one day, and although I quickly dried out, my little electronic friend did not. I did have it insured, but the deductible still hurts, not to mention the hassles involved in the replacement process. That’s why it made me smile when I made a recent photo sale to Alaska Magazine from that specific trip, for the exact amount of the deductible. Furthermore, it was taken with that 5D before it went swimming. Things don’t always turn out that way, but it feels good when they do. Thanks to Angus Rose for being a great model!

Hiking in the Brooks range at the headwaters of the Nigu River, Gates of the Arctic National Park. Thanks Angus for playing model! Love those tattoos on the calf!

Cover of the American Profile magazine. Mitch Seavey in the last 20 mile stretch before the finish line in the All Alaska Sweepstakes dog sled race in Nome Alaska, March, 2008.

In Alaska, the heart of the dog mushing season is now. Both the Yukon Quest and the Fur Rondy races are completed and the North American and Iditarod are beginning soon.

I presume this timing was suited for a recent story in the American Profile, which is an insert magazine in newspapers across the country. “Sledding with the Seaveys” is a story about the Seavey family and their dog mushing history.

It is also timely in that Dallas Seavey won the Yukon Quest a few weeks ago, the youngest musher ever to take the title. As the field of mushers prepare for the Iditarod, this year is certainly shaping up to be an interesting and competitive race.

The cover of the magazine was from a shoot I did two years ago in Nome, Alaska, during a sled dog race called the “All Alaska Sweepstakes“. Mitch Seavey won first place which was a winner-take-all $100,000 purse!

To get the photo, I hired a super cub plane and flew all over the Seward Peninsula, since the race checkpoints were all in remote locations, inaccessible by road. In the final hours of the four day race, about 20 miles outside of the finish line in Nome, we landed the plane on the snow.  I ran over to the trail just in time to capture a shot of Mitch Seavey passing Jeff King to usurp the first place spot. For Jeff King, who was leading the race, ouch, that had to hurt. The top three mushers were Mitch Seavey, Jeff King and Lance Mackey.

As for my purse, well, free lance photography is a shaky business. I invested a lot in covering the race with travel and airfare expense. I did it largely out of personal interest but of course I hoped to at least squeak a day wage out of it. Some investments take a while. Two years later, that trip now registers black instead of red in the accounting ledger. But what a fantastic experience in spite of its economics.

Good luck to the Seavey’s as they race the quickly approaching Iditarod. Both Mitch and Dallas will be contenders.