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

Veterans of river travel know that waterways can be a creature of movement in more ways than one. In mountain country, rainfall in the hills all goes downhill by gravity and ends up ocean-bound via the river system. In Alaska’s arctic specifically, most river flow is dominated by snow melt or rain, unlike many of the glacier melt rivers of the interior. So when the rain comes in abundance while on a wilderness river trip, vigilance is prudent. While on the Marsh Fork of the Canning river in July, plenty of rain fell in the mountains of the Brooks Range, creating a swollen river. Note the two pictures below which reflect the rapid change that can happen as a result of heavy rains.

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.

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 location in the ANWR. But what is surprising to me and the reason I’m including it here, is that I did a little experiment and shot the picture with a lens configuration that I don’t normally use. Generally, I would have my trusty 500mm lens but I hiked 4000 vertical feet, so I packed light and chose the 100-400mm lens for versatility. 400mm is not really powerful enough to pull in many birds, and just for grins I thought I’d try it with a 1.4x for a little more reach. The 5D Mark II camera will not autofocus with this lens configuration because the aperture is f/8 at the widest, introducing a challenge of its own. However, I was very, very surprised at the sharpness of this image, all things considered. The camera and lens were mounted on my tiny gitzo tripod, and shot in less than ideal conditions. There are obvious limitations to this configuration, but some obvious benefits also, and based on this real-time-field-test, I’ll be doing some more experimenting with that set up in the future. I’ve included a crop of the original capture to show the sharpness of the image.

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 the Canning river, the elegant paintbrush was a very common wildflower present, and a beautifully colored and textured one at that. Because I was traveling light while backpacking, I chose to leave my 100 f/2.8 macro lens behind. As an alternative, I took the Canon 500D close up filter which is a magnifying glass filter that screws onto the outside of a lens. While there is a slight loss in quality, it is pretty minimal and easily worth the trade in weight for this kind of travel. The 100-400 lens offers versatile framing functionality for the tedious composition often intrinsic to macro work. I chose 1/200 sec. exposure due to a slight breeze that was blowing along the river bar, and it therefore captured a sharp image. The medium depth of field for macro adds enough eye focus control, but lets the main blossom be interpretable. Selecting a position that renders a fairly clean background can be a challenge, but the pink distant flowers work well in this picture. I used a tiny gitzo tripod with an RSS mini ballhead.

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.

A photographer’s schedule in June, in the arctic, is a complete function of weather and daylight. The blue cloudless skies become a curse, at least until about midnight when the warm wash of light drips across the landscape, and even then, some sort of cloud action helps grab some color in the sky. I unfortunately had too much clear weather during my trip to the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska last June, if one can squeak out such a complaint. My schedule was inverted from my normal early morning routine, and I found myself often going to bed about the time I usually wake up. Below are a few shots taken from Archimedes ridge, a great expansive platform that gives views for miles around, and easy ground for covering miles on foot.