Photos of 2009
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Category Archives: Photography
Grizzly Bear Chasing Salmon
Hey Folks,
This Post is About Motion Blurs, Art and Technique
One of the photos I wanted this year was some slower shutter speed blurs of grizzly bears chasing spawning Sockeye Salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) up the river.
This kind of image is difficult to do with grizzly bears; well, not difficult to do, but difficult to manage a photo that works.
More so, I think, than with most other animals.
The result of this is that it seems to take about 5 times as many attempts to get a decent ‘panblur’ of a grizzly bear than it might, for example, of a caribou or wolf.
What’s a Panblur Photo?
What I’m calling a ‘panblur’, for those of you who aren’t certain, is a technique of slowing down the shutter speed when shooting movement, so that the subject becomes blurred, rather than crisp and sharp.
You can see in the image above the spashing water and the legs of the bear are not to sharp at all. By panning the camera along with the bear as it races through the water,
Continue readingMt. Blackburn and John Muir
Mt. Blackburn stands tall to catch the sun’s first rays of alpenglow, high above the Kennicott Valley, early fall, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.
Hey Folks,
I just visited my friend Mark Graf’s great blog, and read with interest his commentary on mountains and the import and grandeur of nature, the role it can play in our lives. Mark prefaces his post with the legendary John Muir, so I’ll do the same:
“Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail. – John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901”
While I think it’s a fantastic photo Mark posted, and a great post, (I’d ask that you read it and the comments that follow) I have to be the lone opponent in the discussion here;
Continue readingNikon Capture NX2 and Adobe CS4.
Photo above extracted via Nikon Capture NX2.2.2 Continue reading
Grizzly Bears or Landscapes, Wilderness Discussion.
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” – Thich Nhat Hahn.
Hey Folks,
Well, with all the comments about landscapes versus bear photos on the last few pages, I thought I’d try a compromise. I know, I know, compromises end up pleasing no one, right? Well, so be it.
This is possibly the last photo I took on my trip last month, a sunset over Naknek Lake – I was hoping for some nice clear skies the following morning – and actually had a big sunrise – but then it clouded over, very soon afterward, and no good light was had for the morning shooting. Then I had to pack and get ready for the plane to come pick me up. The trip was all over too soon.
The photo is one exposure, so no real photoshop trickery – I even left the gull in the bay (@ Ron 🙂 ).
The real reason I wanted to post this photo was, honestly, a talk I went to listen to tonight, at a local bookstore, by a great Alaskan writer, Bill Sherwonit.
Continue readingWendell Berry and Guy Tal
A winter sunset over the Mentasta Mountains, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.
Hey Folks,
“The effort to clarify our sight cannot begin in the society, but only in the eye and in the mind. It is a spiritual quest, not a political function. We each must confront the world alone and learn to see it for ourselves”. So says Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers, in his book “The Unforeseen Wilderness”. The book, a dearly needed plea to save Kentucky’s Red River Gorge from a nefarious plan to dam it, was written nearly 40 years ago. I haven’t read the book completely yet, as I just bought it this afternoon. But I glanced at it, and this passage caught my attention. Berry continues on:
“the figure of the photographic artist – not the tourist-photographer who goes to a place, bound by his intentions and preconceptions, to record what has already been recorded and what he therefore expects to find, but the photographer who goes into a place in search of the real news of it”.*
Continue readingShadows and Light
Hey Folks,
Here’s another photo I took on my most recent sojoun to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska. I’d been hoping to find some scenes like this, but they’re hard to come by. Fresh snow still sitting on a spruce tree, in nice warm sunshine. Usually, after a nice dump of snow, wind blows it off the trees before the weather clears up enough for this kind of photo.
One calm evening I went up on this ridge, not a breath of air was stirring down in the forest at the cabin. But up high, the wind was blowing like crazy. It was weird, it’d blow really hard for a few seconds, a gust, then stop and all was perfectly still for a few seconds, then the wind would kick up again, often from exactly the opposite direction it had last came.
This went on for a few hours. I didn’t shoot much that afternoon, but it was cool to see this crazy weather. A few days later, after we’d had some more snow fall, up I went again, and got some nicer conditions.
Continue readingFire Pink Wildflower photo, Georgia
Hey Folks,
Here’s another flower, the Fire Pink, from the Chattahoochee National Forest, North Georgia Mountains, Georgia. I took this one spring hike up in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, near the North Carolina border.
Spring in the Appalachians is an amazing time, the biomass that is generated in the hardwood forests there in a couple of weeks is simply awesome. The woods go from bare and barren to an incredibly rich, diverse glut of biota in what seems like a couple of days. Walking through the deep green forest and seeing a red glow like this little flower is way cool. The red is so bright, I had to dull it down a little on the computer to make it not look overdone – it’s really an intense vibrant flower.
I think there was a push to make the Fire Pink the State Flower of Indiana, but I’m unsure if it ever went ahead. Fire Pinks should be the State Flower of some state, I can tell you that – they’re just way to cool not to be!
I was going to wait until springtime to post flowers, but my friend Ron Niebrugge is having such a whale of a time down in California shooting the bloom of the century in the desert, I didn’t want to be left out. Check out his blog right now for some downright NASTY wildflower photos! 🙂
Cheers
Carl
Indian Paintbrush Photo, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
Hey Folks,
Here’s a photo of an Indian Paintbrush, wildflower Castilleja miniata, from the Canadian Rockies, in Banff National Park. Banff National Park and the surrounding Greater Canadian Rockies ecosystem is a simply amazing place to photograph, with a myriad subjects to seek out and photograph.
Banff National Park has awesome mountain scenery, forests and montane ecosystems, sub-alpine and alpine regions, lakes and ponds, sloughs, rivers, glaciers, icefields, waterfalls, canyons, rockfaces, wildflowers, shrubs and grasses. Aspen trees, pine, larch, spruce, and so on.
Wildlife photography in the area is probably some of the best in North America, second only (maybe) to Yellowstone National Park, which is just over a day’s drive south. Elk, moose, caribou, mule deer, whitetail deer, grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, coyotes, foxes, bald eagles, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, to chipmunks, magpies and jays – a long, long list of subjects.
Continue readingHappy Birthday, Mum!!
Hey Folks
Today’s my mum’s birthday! Happy birthday, mum! Mum refers to October as her ‘birthday month’, meaning she celebrates her birthday for the entire month of October.. which translates to ‘whatever mum wants goes for the month of October’. Pretty nifty deal, for her, I spose. Anyway, it’s all OK, because she’s mum. Happy birthday, mum – Love you!
Continue reading