Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Travel”
We photograph more than just bears on my Alaska Bear and Puffin Tour! There were sure a lot of puffin this year!
The folks who were willing to wade through the maze of testing and other covid requirements were sure awarded with an absolutely amazing trip! Three sows appeared with spring cubs, including our favorite Crimp who has triplets this year! We saw lots of nursing, cubs playing, clam digging, even a wolf and fox, it was incredible. Plus, were basically the only ones in the fields the whole time. Looks like 2020 will be a year to remember in Alaska.
Olympus E-M1X and 300 f/4
This photo is from June of 2014, seems like a lifetime ago!
I have received some really nice emails and calls checking on us to make sure all is well since I haven’t posted anything in awhile. In short, yes, fortunately all is well, but it has been a challenging few months and a fire threatening our Tucson Desert Photo Retreat seemed like the final blow. Thankfully, the Tortolita fire has been contained, and the threat mostly eliminated thanks very much to the many firefighters who battled that blaze in challenging conditions. Unfortunately, a second fire continues to burn and threaten other parts of Tucson, and my heart goes out to those folks.
Really beginning in March with our Arizona business and continuing until now, we have been busy with cancellations, re-bookings and working through many other challenges. It was hard to look out from the home office last week at a humpback whale and beautiful weather knowing I should have been leading my Kenai Fjords trip right then.
However, much has changed in the last couple of weeks. With Alaska’s requirement for a Covid test before flying, and offering a second test at the airport upon arrival, coupled with numerous other precautions including private rooms for everyone, and meals delivered to rooms, we are now ready to offer our first bear trip of the season with a small group. In fact, we will be the only group at the lodge, and likely the only people in the entire area! I hope I’m wrong, but I believe testing coupled with other precautions is how trips in Alaska will be lead this summer and next, so we might as well figure out how to do them safely.
I will say, I’m excited to get back to the bears, to a place where life revolves around nature, wildlife and tides.
I don’t typically share mistakes, but this is an interesting one. This was from later in the evening from my single bat image.
The way I do bat photography is with a Cognisys Sabre. I set the aperture and ISO, then put the camera in bulb mode and let the Sabre manage the shutter. I can tell the Sabre to take continues exposures for a set length of time. At the beginning of the night when there is some ambient light, I do back to back to back 3 or 4 second exposures. Later in the evening I switch to 30 second exposures. So the Sabre captures photo after photo until it senses a bat. Then it fires my flashes and closes the shutter. That way I don’t capture multiple images in the same frame.
So what happened here? Before going to bed, I always check on the setup, change out camera batteries etc. Well, I must have accidentally bumped off of bulb mode to 60 second manual exposure. In this mode, the Sabre keeps firing the flashes, but has no way of closing the shutter. So this is 4 or 5 separate flash firings which is why the rocks in the background are exposed, and 5 different bats! The bat activity really comes in flurries as you can see here.
I’m going to make some small changes to the setup next winter and looking forward to having everything fine-tuned and working great – lots of possibilities here! I have noticed that skunks and other animals will sometimes climb up on this giant water table at night which could provide some cool opportunities for back lighting from below and doing other creative things with the flashes.
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