I am pleased to share my latest cover image on Alaska Airlines.  This is the 3rd time this year and the 2nd month in a row that they have selected one of my photographs for the cover of their in-flight magazine.  I photographed this brown bear diving for a salmon when I visited the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary & Refuge in August 2006.  My buddy & I were fortunate to be the only visitors the last week of August, so the ranger gave us a private tour.  Even he said that he had never been to some of the areas that we hiked to.  I had applied several years in a row for the lottery but never got a permit.  Like most people, I had applied for the height of the salmon run and the bear congregation in July.  This time I applied for the last week of the season and received a permit.  So did 8 other people, but none of them showed up.  I’ve was told that it is also easy to get a permit for the first week or two of the summer.  So, keep those shoulder season dates in mind if you ever want to photograph brown bears and have McNeil River all to yourself.

One of my underwater humpback whale images appears on billboards in New Zealand this month.  (Anyone in NZ able to send me a picture?)  When I first set out to make a living as a professional photographer, I initially found success selling fine-art prints through galleries & art shows.  That business model ceased being effective with the down-turn in the economy, so I turned my focus to my website.  Many of my modest sales now come from having good SEO.  This sale is a perfect example.  A design firm contacted me a few weeks ago after searching the web, offered me a reasonable usage rate, I emailed them the file, and they wire-transferred the money to me.  How easy was that?

Tonight is the awards ceremony for the 2010 International Conservation Photography Awards at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.  The exhibit opens to the general public tomorrow.  My image of a Steller sea lion underwater won 2nd Place in the Underwater category.  It is featured on most of the promotional materials, including this poster that is currently displayed all around Seattle.  I also received an Honorable Mention in the Landscape category for my Badwater Salt Crust Sunrise image from Death Valley National  Park.  I am really looking forward to seeing some of my friends, like Stuart Westmorland & Sean Bagshaw, and meeting a number of photographers that I only know online, including Todd Mintz, Jim Patterson, & David M Cobb.

I am pleased to share my latest publishing accomplishment.  My “Paradise Wildflowers” image from Mount Rainier National Park is the June 2010 cover on Alaska Airlines!  This is also my 2nd cover with them this year.  This picture is my all-time most successful art print and has been licensed numerous times since I created it in 2003.  Most of my regular readers will know that I shot all of my landscape images up until last year with a Pentax 67 system.  One of the challenges of that system was that I had limited depth-of-field compared to a 35mm system.  In order to overcome that limitation, I created this image with Toyo 4×5 view camera, a Rodenstock 65mm large format lens, and a Horseman 6×9 roll film back.  (Did I lose you, yet?)  With the large format camera, I tilted the lens so that the flowers would be close to the camera while keeping the summit of Mount Rainier in focus.  I also used my Singh-Ray Warming Polarizer and 2-stop Hard Graduated Neutral Density filter with Fuji Velvia film.  I think that the exposure was about 10 seconds at f32, which is a life-time when waiting for a slight breeze to stop rustling the wildflowers.  Now when I photograph flower landscapes like this, I use my Canon 5DmkII with a wide-angle lens with camera settings more like f16, 1/4 second, and 200 ISO.  Since this was the first image that I ever took with my 4×5, I was still learning how to use it that morning.  I mentioned that I used a 6×9 roll film back.  All of my images that I shot were the 6×9 format except for 1 frame that overlapped the frame before it.  That image perfectly cropped itself in the camera to 6×7 which is my favorite photo that you see here.  Beginners luck?

My Reflection Lake Sunrise image is featured prominently in a new Washington State tourism advertisement.  This ad will be shown in markets throughout North America during the next year.  If you are looking for an exciting travel destination, Washington offers an incredibly diverse experience.  It is one of the few places where you can experience islands, beaches, mountains, glaciers, forests, & deserts all during the same trip.  I always recommend early September to first time visitors.  It has the most reliable dry weather and the summer crowds are gone.  Are you ready to experiencewa?

My image “Racetrack Sunset” will be the April cover photo of Outdoor Photographer!  “The Racetrack” is a seasonally dry lake located in the northern part of Death Valley National Park and is famous for its moving rocks.  With the right combination of rain and wind, the rocks move slowly across the surface of the playa, leaving a track as they go.  I photographed this amazing rock at sunset during my first visit to the Racetrack in January 2006.  I was enthralled with the unusual arc that it had created as it was moving.  This rock was still in the same location during my recent Death Valley National Park Tour.

I am pleased to announce that my image Humpback Whale 6 is featured on the cover of the February 2010 issue of Alaska Airlines magazine!  Be sure to check it out if you are on an Alaska Airlines flight this month.  Also, the opening double page image to the humpback whale article was photographed by my friend Brandon Cole during a previous trip that we took together.  I have the exact same image, since we were next to each other in the water when we both almost got run over by a humpback whale mother & calf.  Photographing whales above or below water is my favorite kind of photography.  It also helps that I am comfortable swimming in the open ocean in 10,000 feet of water and enjoy staring down into the blue depths underneath my fins.

This is a great blog post to transition from my dramatic landscape photography to more of my new wildlife images from the last year.  I’ve been tightly editing my image archives the last few weeks and have come across a few keepers that are worth sharing in the days ahead.

For the third time this year, one of my images graces the cover of Backpacker magazine.  The March 2010 issue’s cover shot is my image “Lago Pehoe Fiery Sunrise“.  I also give tips on photographing wide-angle landscape scenes in the article “Shoot Like a Pro” on pages 36-42, and my image “Spray Park Wildflowers 1” is featured on page 37.

In other news, I am currently updating my website to make it is easier to sign up for my photography tours, purchase my fine art prints, and license my images.  The overall design is going to stay the same, I just need to simplify access for my customers.  I also need to add several new galleries and update my older ones with the new images that I have created during the past 16 months.

This image was created last week on the Matanuska Glacier in the Chugach National Forest in Alaska.  I spent 2 nights photographing the glacier, and on the second night I caught a dramatic fiery sunset!  If you followed along on my recent trip via Twitter/Facebook you might have seen some of my iPhone “sketches”, but nothing beats the “real deal” images from my Canon 5D mkII.  Getting to this location on the tongue of the glacier was challenging.  It involved crossing ankle-drowning silt and hopping over a few small crevasses.  Once I found this precariously balanced rock for a foreground subject, I just waited for something magical to happen and it did.

I have several presentations scheduled in October.  I’d love to meet some more of my fans/fellow photographers, so please mark down these dates:

October 8th at 7pm, I will be giving a Free Presentation of my award-winning images at the Seattle REI.  I will be showcasing many new images from my summer trips to Alaska & British Columbia, in addition to my “classics”.

October 9th from 6-9pm, I will be at the Washington Wilderness Coalition displaying prints and answering questions as part of the monthly Greenwood neighborhood artwalk.

October 17 from 11-2pm, I will be teaching an Outdoor Photography Clinic at the Seattle REI.  As I did at my last clinic, I will be covering everything from camera basics to website SEO & social networking.  Participants are invited to bring 2-3 images for review.  The cost is $75 with a class limit of 12.  To sign up please email Chelsea Beck or call 206-223-1944.

My above image, taken in Denali National Park in August 2006, is the cover photo of the 2010 Sierra Club Wilderness calendar!  I’d visited this pond in 2005 but I never got this kind of light, or even saw the mountain.  In 2006 I tried a few times to photograph Denali from this spot, but never got the mountain itself until my perseverance paid off with this dramatic and striking image.  There are hundreds of ponds near the Wonder Lake campground and I’d walked by most of them, deciding that this was the nicest one that framed the mountain.  It is  accessible via a strenuous 1 hour hike southwest of the campground.  I missed the fall colors in Denali this year, but I am flying up to Anchorage on Monday to look for fall colors around the Chugach & Kenai for the next 10 days.  Wish me luck.