Iceberg in Harriman Fjord. This is from a private boat charter from Whittier, and it takes us to one of my favorite places in all of Alaska – Harriman Fjord. Here we find mountains that rise 9600’ abruptly above sea level and 5 glaciers. Even on a rainy day, we almost always get something good here. Custom boat charters let us decide how much time we spend on location. Tour boats are on a fixed schedule and often don’t spend a lot of time in locations or with subjects of great photo potential.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 lens at 105mm
ISO 400, 1/500th second at f/11
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL filter
Hand held
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments.

Lupine at sunset, Turnagain Arm. This is one of my favorite spots along the Seward Highway near Girdwood. It’s all about timing. Lupine blooms are at their peak in late June which means to catch the best light you are up real late or early. This shot is about 10pm on June 24, 2024. This represents the quality of images you can make right off the highway if the lighting works.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 lens at 31mm
ISO 200, 1/40th second at f/16
Really Right Stuff tripod and head
Processing: Sky mask applied to bring out colors and textures without blowing out flowers.

Trumpeter swan cygnet in late June. Several generations of trumpeters have raised broods on Six-Mile Lake which has restricted access. These swans are more tolerant of people than most swans I’ve worked with and that created some magical moments this summer. Swans mate for life. This year, the pair had 6 cygnets but lost one. On our last check of them in October they still had 5 and all of them were healthy and within days of taking off on their first flights.
Canon R7, Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 lens at 223mm
ISO 1600, 1/800th second at f/5.6
Hand held
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments.

Kiteboarding, Turnagain Arm near Portage Valley. This was an opportunistic shot driving down the Seward Highway. In early summer, nearby glaciers and lingering snow create katabatic winds and on an incoming tide, surfers and kiteboarders come out to play. It’s hard to resist passing up an opportunity to practice action photography. My first priority is to capture a sense of place with a small figure in a big landscape. This scenario was about recognizing that all the good ingredients for a good image just fell into place. All we had to do was stop and work the situation. Action shooting is always a lot of fun for me and most clients alike.
Canon R5, Canon RF 70-200mm f/4 lens at 200mm
ISO 800, 1/1600th second at f/5.6
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL filter
Hand held
Processing: Basic with about 30 dehaze and a sky mask to make clouds and blue sky a little richer and darker.

Lone bear clamming at low tide at sunrise in Lake Clark National Park along the Cook Inlet Coast. Being primarily a landscape shooter I am hard wired to look for environmental shots vs close up or behavioral shots of wildlife. The sunrise on this morning was OK with soft colors but when the bear stopped and sniffed the air, I thought it was better to use the wider lens on the second body. (I carry 2 cameras with different lenses when working bears here.) My goal was to capture the rich textures of the wet sand and morning clouds. When you have nice colors and good separation, a lot of negative space works giving a more expansive feel to the bear’s surroundings.
Canon R7, Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 lens at 25mm
ISO 800, 1/125th second at f/8
+1 stop exposure compensation
Hand held
Processing: I spent more time processing this than I do with most images. Processing started with making sure I had a histogram that captured the most dynamic range possible. Before I began shooting, I set my exposure comp to +1 stop to make sure I didn’t lose any detail in the bear. I processed the bear differently than the background with my goal of making the image look as close to what I remember seeing as possible. I processed the background with moderate dehaze, texture, and contrast to bring the scene the way I remember seeing it. I masked the bear, refining the mask with a detailed brush tool, and then subtracted out the dehaze and added exposure to bring out the bear. I removed one gull to the bear’s left as it was distracting to me.

Action is a numbers game. When you find a good situation, go to town! With bears, I key in on interaction and playfulness. This was a fast-breaking scenario in less than ideal light. The first consideration was making sure I had plenty of detail in the bears without blowing out the background. This is where reading your histogram is paramount to getting information to use in post processing phase. Our group spent a good 10 minutes photographing these bears. In editing, I just cherry pick peak action and delete the rest. This frame ended up being among my favorites.
Canon R5, Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 lens at 363mm
ISO 1600, 1/2500th second at f/6.3
+1.7 stop exposure compensation
Hand held
Processing: I masked the bears to bring out more texture in their fur and brightened slightly. The rest of the image was processed to accurately reflect the gloomy mood of a stormy morning. I added a little vignette to draw more attention to the bears.

Meltwater on Bear Glacier, Kenai Fjords National Park.
This is from a private tour where we got really lucky with clearing storm light on the morning we were scheduled to fly. Solid rain took place for the 3-days prior to this shoot.
I have really come to love aerial photography from a helicopter with the doors off. It opens up so many opportunities not possible from a boat or vehicle on the highway. Photographing massive glaciers gives us an opportunity to capture nice textures, colors and details like what’s seen here. It doesn’t always have to be about the grand landscape.
Due to motion and shake on the helicopter I shoot with both fast shutter speeds and a decent aperture (f/11) to maximize image quality and depth of field. The sacrifice is using a high ISO but I have found on properly exposed images with light tones, ISO 800 is virtually noiseless.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24-1050mm f/4 lens at 70mm
ISO 800, 1/1250th second at f/11
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL filter
Hand held
Processing: Minimal with about +30 dehaze.

This hidden gem is one of my favorite short hikes and we took 2 private clients here. I love backcountry landscapes. This is Portage Lake and Glacier and it’s only a 4-mile round trip on a rough at times, rocky trail with an 800’ climb. This is a very wet place so timing matters. We went here on a morning that the lake and mountains were still obscured by fog and low clouds knowing the cloud cover would lift yielding a grand reveal of the surrounding peaks and direct sun. That happened as forecast. But that soft bright light with fog was just great to me and was ideal for both the foreground flowers and for Lauri standing along the shore with her iPhone.
The low clouds simplified the composition and added more emphasis on the glacier, revealing more of its color and texture than the full sun version with mountain tops. I never pass an opportunity to add a human element for scale. As far as composition goes, I just saw no reason to place her off to the side, so I broke rules and put her in the middle with respect to left to right.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 lens at 40mm
ISO 100, 1/10th second at f/16
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL filter
Really Right Stuff tripod and head
Processing: Dehazing and texture sliders really helped reveal the best of this landscape. Those two sliders are often not good with people. So I usually mask the person with the objects tool and just subtract out the texture and dehaze from the person.

Icebergs in Kenai Fjords National Park. It’s a rare occasion when I am eager to end aerial shooting out of a helicopter with the doors off but when I saw this shallow fog and the position of the sun I knew the backlight would be magic and that this mood would last only a short time.
When we landed on the beach I couldn’t get out of the helicopter fast enough and just started shooting like a mad man. Ten minutes later, it was all gone.
I’m glad I trusted my instincts and was able to pre visualize what this might look like while we were still in the air. The entire scene was beautifully lit but I thought the best image would be a tight shot just focusing on the bergs and beautiful backlight.
It rains a lot on the Kenai Peninsula Coast. I felt fortunate we were able to see this magical light on the morning of a private photo tour.
Canon R5, Canon RF 70-200mm f/4 lens at 86mm
ISO 320, 1/25000th second at f8
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL filter
Hand held
Processing: My goal was to enhance the warm/cold juxtaposition without altering reality. I first processed for the white balance and bringing out the warm colors of the background in backlight. I then used a color range mask on the bergs, cleaned up the mask’s edges with a brush and subtracted out the warm white balance from bergs restoring their blue hues.

Aurora borealis above Six-Mile Lake, JBER, Anchorage. This was the earliest I have ever photographed aurora in Alaska on August 12th! The key to successful aurora (or any sky image) is foregrounds and context. They have to work. My foreground was a little weak so I added the human element to help out. Lauri is lit with a headlamp carefully aimed to not have any light bleed below her.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24mm f/1.8
ISO 1600, 10 seconds at f/3.5
Really Right Stuff tripod and head
Processing: Aurora images are always tough to process. It’s easy to get fooled by a nice bright LCD in a dark environment thinking you have a good exposure. In order for most aurora images to work, you have to have detail in the shadows otherwise noise becomes so extreme it’s hard to fix. I processed this to maintain a bit of cobalt blue in the night sky without losing the greens of the aurora. I used Lightroom’s Denoise algorithm and it worked just fine.

Fog over Knob Lakes off the Glenn Highway. This is one of my favorite areas in Southcentral Alaska. There are several vantage points right along the highway to shoot a sunrise. On clear nights in late summer and fall, fog is almost a given which always adds to visual interest. After sunrise and the fog starts lifting we travel down into the valley you see here and photograph from the lakes.
Canon R5, Canon RF 70-200mm f/4 at 200mm
ISO 100 1/80th second at f/15
Really Right Stuff tripod and ballhead
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments.

Aurora over the Maclaren River and Alaska Range. For night sky images, foregrounds matter and my go-to foreground to enhance and emphasize the colors of the night sky is water and the slow flowing river fit the bill. This is one of my favorite locations along the Denali Highway.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24mm f/1.8
ISO 4000 13 seconds at f3.2
Processing: My workflow on aurora shots is often to process the sky differently than the foreground. After using global adjustments to get the foreground where I needed it, I then masked the sky and most of the river tone down the exposure. Lightroom Denoise feature did a great job on smoothing out the image.

Tundra in autumn colors and the Alaska Range from Maclaren River. We timed our Denali Highway tour to coincide with peak tundra fall colors and this year did not disappoint! After a successful night photographing aurora, I got up about 8am to fog and just waited for a reveal to capture this scene.
Canon R5, Canon RF 70-200mm f/4 lens at 110mm
ISO 100, 1/15th second at f/11
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL filter
Really Right Stuff tripod and ballhead
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments. I did a color range mask on the blue in the sky. This is a front lit and near shadowless image. Front light has a tendency to wash out blue skies. Thankfully, processing tools help restore blue sky color.

Lane Valley Peaks and fall colors near Hatcher Pass. This place gets great fall colors and there is often a moody feel here on cloudy days. I think mountains photograph well if they are shroud in clouds with low clouds below ridge levels. The type of clouds that don’t work with mountain photography are bland grey/white and featureless clouds that are all above ridge top levels. Flat light with a splash of sun helps with saturated colors of the vegetation.
Canon R5, Canon 24-105mm f/4 at 105mm
ISO 500 1/125th second at f/16
Hand held
Breakthrough Photography X4 polarizer
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments.

Photographing the Knik Glacier with fall tundra colors. This is not ideal light. A background brighter than the foreground makes exposure and processing a bit tricky. Using the histogram, I carefully exposed to not to blow out the glacier and clouds and not to block up the foreground tundra. With a full range of captured information, I knew I could process this to get the a full range of detail in both foreground and background. I used one of my participants to add scale and context to this enormously big scene.
Canon R5, Canon 24-105mm f/4 at 40mm
ISO 800 1/400th second at f/10
Hand held
Breakthrough Photography X4 polarizer
Processing: Glacier and clouds were selectively masked using color range and exposure brought back down to match the brightness of the tundra and photographer.

Moose, Coastal Trail, Kincaid Park, Anchorage. You would be surprised at how a 1500 lb. animal can hide so easily in the boreal forest – but they do. Sometimes, we walk for 3-4 miles along the vast network of cross country ski trails diligently looking for moose or bears. Sometimes you get skunked. They are around but well hidden. Then, other times, such as this, after you’ve spent nearly 2 hours photographing another great moose scenario you are hiking out, stomach grumbling from a long morning hiking, and you see this magnificent animal grazing right in front of you and very relaxed. We couldn’t go around him. All we could do was either a wide detour on another trail, or just wait until he decides to move around you – which is what we did. It was well worth the extra hour and hunger pains.
Canon R5, Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.7-7.1 lens at 167mm
ISO 5000, 1/200th second at f/7.1
Hand held with IS in mode 2
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments. I used LR noise reduction on this and it did a great job.

We didn’t get that many great sunrises this summer where we were. In fact, I only remember 3 with this one being the best and most colorful. This was a classic approaching storm at sunrise sky color explosion and I saw the potential for this from looking at models on windy.com.
We were on it. We pre-scouted locations along the Glenn Highway in the northern Chugach. This was a creative challenge with composition because there was so much happening visually that I had a hard time determining how much sky to mountain to colorful fall color foreground to include. I tried many variations with more and less sky and in the end decided this was the best balance of foreground, middle ground and sky to capture the great colors that morning in mid-September.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 lens at 56mm
ISO 100, 1/2 second at f/11
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL filter
Really Right Stuff tripod and head
Processing: In order to bring out the rich colors of the clouds at sunrise I did a sky mask, cleaned up the edges with a brush tool and processed the sky differently. I first increased global exposure and warm white balance to reveal the scene below the horizon. In doing so it washed out the sky. Using the sky mask allowed me to cool the white balance and use dehaze to bring out the colors and textures.

Fall colors and Denmark Peak in the Chugach Mountains. I really love shooting from a helicopter with doors off and we were lucky with the fall colors holding on so late into September. Last year at this time the whole scene was blanketed in snow.
Canon R5, Canon 24-105mm f/4 at 40mm
ISO 800 1/1250th second at f/8
Hand held (IS off)
Breakthrough Photography X4 polarizer
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments.

Dawn alpenglow along the Denali Highway. This was the last morning of open water for the season on this nameless lake on a crisp, 20 degree dawn in late September. This is warm, soft indirect light – my favorite – that is captured better on digital sensors than it ever was on film. You can see the Belt of Venus over the Clearwater Mountains where the earth casts its own shadow showing a band of blue beneath the alpenglow.
Canon R5, Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 lens at 85mm
ISO 100, 1 second at f/11
Breakthrough Photography X4 CPL
Really Right Stuff tripod and ballhead
Processing: Minimal with basic adjustments.