Alaska Wood Frog

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Alaska Wood Frod in Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska

Alaska Wood Frod in Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

Quite a break from the blog. Lucky me!

Here’s a cool photo of a critter we don’t see a lot of in Alaska; the Wood frog. Taken along the coast of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park near Malaspina Glacier. We saw quite a few of these wood frogs, and literally, thousands of tadpoles. I haven’t seen a tadpole in 25 years. Way too cool.

Cheers

Carl

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the Northern Lights

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Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the northern lights, Alaska.

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and the aurora borealis photo, or northern lights, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

We’ve had some pretty great weather here through the month of February, and that means, a great time to get out and look for northern lights. Working on my own project, rather than photo tours, I was able to hit a few destinations I wanted to shoot that are a little more hit and miss; less reliable than some others, but places I wanted to shoot nonetheless.

One of those places is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Inevitably I’d be in the wrong place at the wrong time in a place slightly larger than the country of Switzerland; I’d head off in one direction and then have fog and haze cloud up the skies, or I’d head off in another direction, and the lights display would be directly behind me. The mountains in front me being what I want to shoot, and the lights behind me. Not a great mix.

But, such is what happens when you have specific ideas in mind; it’s important to be flexible in nature photography, and particularly so when shooting the northern lights, but part of working on a project involves fulfilling your own ideas. Spontaneity is great, and I’m all for it. But I’m also interested in trying to make a photo of something I envision ahead of time, and working toward that.

It’s a rewarding, but often frustrating endeavor. Continue reading →

Northern lights and motion

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Aurora borealis photo, or northern lights, Alaska.

Trying something different – the northern lights and a little motion. Click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

Just trying a little something different; hoping to give a little sense of motion to the northern lights the other night.

Not that I’m bored shooting the northern lights, or anything; just trying to see what else might work.

Thoughts, anyone? Works? Awful? WTF?

Cheers

Carl

Editing some old images – what to keep, what to toss

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A young male brown bear walks up a salmon stream fishing for Sockeye salmon in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

A young male brown bear walks up a salmon stream fishing for Sockeye salmon in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

So far this winter, I’ve spent a good bit of time editing old images from my hard drives. Mostly, cleaning up the hard drives and deleting images I don’t wish to keep. I’m trying to be a little lot more ruthless in my editing lately, and really have been cleaning up the storage space. I cleaned out over 50GB of space last week, and I’m still only a fraction of the way into that 1TB drive. I’ll probably cut it in half by the time I’m through.

It’s difficult to know exactly what to keep and what to drop some times.

Here’s a brown bear image I recently had a sale inquiry about, of a brown bear from Katmai National Park and Preserve. A beautiful bear, don’t you agree?

So when this bear came walking up the river towards our group, I shot a number of images. 22, in fact. Mostly, poorly frame photos where a branch disturbs the background, or the bears ears are back or he’s looking out of the frame or some such things that distract from the image. Maybe 3 or 4 are keepers from the sequence. I’ve processed and uploaded 2 to the website; here’s the other photo I uploaded to the site. The rest of the sequence really aren’t images I’m likely to sell. Continue reading →

Facebook Page Metrics

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Metrics from a post on Facebook

Performance metric data from a post on Facebook.

Hey Folks

I’m sure any of the photographers out there who might chance upon reading this post have themselves what is called a “Facebook Page”. For those non-photography folks who use The Face simply for personal use, a ‘page’ is akin to your profile, but it’s designed for a business, or an artist, etc. Businesses are not allowed to have a profile, but must have created a ‘page’ if they wish to have a Facebook presence. My Facebook pages are here and here, if you’re interested, one for my photography (Skolai Images) and one for my guiding business, Expeditions Alaska.

Pages, over profiles, have the nice benefit of what they call “insights”, where the calculators at Facebook show you how well you’re doing with your Facebook marketing, branding, promotion, engagement, and so on. They have information available like how many visits your page has, how much “engagement” is has had, and even (kinda) where some of that traffic has come from. This data are called Performance Metrics. Continue reading →

Alaska Polar Bear Video

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Hey Folks,

I thought I’d share this video on my site here. I wrote the tune, a number of years ago, and recorded it with some friends in Atlanta, GA, when I lived there. Great musicians all of them, and it was a treat to record with them. I played the guitar parts.

The video and stills I shot in 2013 on my Alaska Polar Bear Photo Tour in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. One or 2 of the clips were shot by clients on the trip, and thanks go to Sue P and Munir K for their permission to use their clips. See my collection of stock polar bear photos here.

Cheers

Carl

Polar bear photo and sunrises

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A young polar bear on the prowl, silhouetted at sunrise, on the frozen ground of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Alaska. Polar bear, Ursus maritimus, Alaska.

A young polar bear on the prowl, silhouetted against a colorful sunrise, on the frozen ground of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Alaska. Polar bear, Ursus maritimus, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

Everyone loves a great sunrise or sunset, right? And everyone loves polar bears; seriously, does anyone NOT love polar bears? So who loves the 2 together?

We set out this morning with high hopes, clear skies and the beginning of color on the horizon. Everyone hoped for a nice sky and some polar bear activity. Hoping, and getting are two different things.

So how does it play out? The sunrise turned out to be, in a word, spectacular. The morning itself, frustrating.

We found some polar bears relatively soon, but they weren’t really in a great location. On top of that, they were asleep. certainly, polar bears are so photogenic that even asleep, they make a great subject. But they were sleeping just below a short embankment, with the colorful sky above and beyond and so we couldn’t find a way to really make it work. One option might have been to shoot multiple exposures, steadily, and then blend the 2 together to properly capture detail in the foreground and the background. I shot a couple of images like this, but even as I was photographing, I knew it wasn’t really happening. OK stuff, but nothing grand. Continue reading →

Polar Bear Sleeping in a Snowstorm

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A polar bear sleeping on the snow covered ground of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Polar Bear, Ursus maritimus, ANWR, Alaska.

A polar bear sleeping in whiteout conditions, on the snow covered ground of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Polar Bear, Ursus maritimus, ANWR, Alaska. Please click on the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

A quick post for while I’m gone; given the current weather most of the readers in the Lower 48 states are experiencing, this one might be somewhat apropos. A polar bear, sleeping in a snowstorm. See folks, it really isn’t that bad.

Polar bears are simply ridiculously photogenic. Even asleep, on a blanket of snow covered ground, and a foggy misty background, they simply look great. It’s a good thing though. Photographing polar bears, or grizzly bears, involves a lot of watching the bear sleep. And sleep. So it’s a nice experiment to see if we can come up with decent photos of the bears sleeping. Continue reading →