Dall Sheep, Polychrome Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska.
These are such amazing animals – it is hard to believe the steep terrain these guys can traverse with ease!
These were captured last Saturday on my recent trip to Denali, the bottom image just after 4:00 a.m., the above photo much later the same day – around 10:00 p.m. The days can be long this time of year!
Dall Sheep, Polychrome Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska.
Grizzly Bear, Denali National Park, Alaska.
We are back from a really fun trip to Denali National Park. We saw lots of wolves, bears, moose with calves, wildflowers and all kinds of weather – perfect! I will be sharing more in the upcoming days.
Typically in early June, the landscape is still very brown with gullies still full of snow – it gives the park a zebra kind of look. Not this year – Denali was incredibly green and we found all kinds of wildflowers – it was beautiful. I thought it was at least 2 weeks ahead of schedule. A ranger who lives in the area year around told us that many of the wildflowers were actually 3 weeks early. So in the desert this spring they were 3 weeks late, here 3 weeks early – crazy stuff.
In the top photo is a sow with an approximately two year old cub. We started watching them a long distance away. At one point the sow playfully chased the cub right at us – I couldn’t roll the windows up fast enough! They seem oblivious to vehicles and buses and hung around us feeding and interacting for a wonderful hour. Below is a much more distant bear – notice how green it is.
Grizzly Bear near Polychrome Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska.
Here is another time lapse video. This one is of the Holland America cruise ship Veendam leaving Seward, Alaska last July 5, 2009. This was my second or third evening of trying to capture a ship leaving – it took a few tries before I could capture the entire turnaround in the frame, while still have a fairly tight composition. If you change the settings in the bottom corner of the You Tube frame, you can see it full frame in 1080 HD.
A post about leaving Seward is fitting as we are leaving Seward later today bound for Denali National Park. We may have one or two occasions where we have access to the internet – if I do, and have something worthy I will put it on the blog, but it is very likely I won’t post again until next Tuesday.
Bartlett Lake, Arizona.
A recently adjusted photo from our spring trip of the wildflowers around Bartlett Lake, Arizona.
Take a 12 minute trip down the Las Vegas Strip in 12 seconds, and then enjoy the Downtown laser light show! I’m surprised it only took 12 minutes to drive the length of the strip, that is because it was a cold, winter mid-week evening. By the way, if you have the bandwidth or patience, you can watch it in 1080 HD.
This is my first attempt at putting together a time-lapse video. I actually captured the stills for the strip footage 4 years ago on the same night as this Las Vegas Strip photo. You might notice that the demolished Stardust is still standing and open, and City Center doesn’t yet exist. The downtown laser show was from last fall.
Four years ago – I had a big head start on the recently popularity for time-lapse – unfortunately these files have just been sitting on my computer. I shot a fair amount of Alaska time-lapse footage last summer, and hope to do something with it soon as well. It has been a bit of a steep learning curve – the long list of words like codec, MPEG4, H.264 are like a whole new language to me. I have to thank Phil Colla for getting me headed in the right direction.
For those who are interested in how I captured the images of the strip, you might enjoy this blog post: Las Vegas Strip
Moon over Resurrection Bay, Seward, Alaska.
This was from last night at 11:15 p.m. I couldn’t believe how huge the moon looked last night – and how calm the bay was, we have been having a wonderful stretch of weather!
Alaska Boy Scout Jamboree and the Celebrity Cruises ship Millennium, Seward, Alaska.
Estimates varied, but I heard there were between 900 to 1,200 scouts camped along the waterfront in Seward for the Scout Jamboree last weekend. I don’t know the exact number, but based on all the tents lining the entire waterfront for as far as I could see – there were a lot!
I thought this photo displayed an interesting dichotomy. Here you have a luxury cruise ship with a 1,950 person capacity passing by some 1,000 tent based Boy Scouts, that together, briefly doubled the size of our town. I’m guessing from the reactions on the beach that most the boys had never seen a ship so large, never mind traveled on such a luxury liner. I’m also guessing that most the cruise ship passengers haven’t spent a night on the ground in a tent in many, many years if ever. But, by judging from all the camera clicks and flash bulbs coming from both directions, that it was clear, everyone was enjoying and appreciating the beauty of a spring evening in our beautiful state, irregardless of how they were traveling – and I think that is cool.
As a side note, I have to admit that I dreaded the thought of living next to 1,000 teenagers for the weekend. But, they couldn’t have been a nicer, better behaved bunch of young adults, we enjoyed watching the festivities from our office, and as far as I’m concerned they are welcomed back anytime!
Mt. Mc Kinley (Denali to most Alaskan's), Denali National Park, Alaska.
As I try to power away on the office work, I can’t help but to day dream away about Alaska’s upcoming summer – it is why most people live here! In just a few weeks we will be back in Denali – a time of year that can be great for baby animals. I’m excited to get back up there.
It seems like in the past week or two we have sold a lot of photos of Denali for various book and calendar projects. Funny how it works – we might go many months without making a sell for a particular subject like Denali, then all of a sudden we see a bunch of activity – then it can go right back to nothing for months. You would think it would trickle in, but often it doesn’t. That is why it really helps to have a wide variety of subject matter.
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