This is a cute tufted puffin that I photographed last June in Lituya Bay on the remote outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska.  During my visit, I used my inflatable boat to explore the sea bird cliffs on the south side of Cenotaph Island.  There were thousands of kittiwakes but only a few breeding pairs of tufted puffins.  The puffins constantly flew back and forth from the tops of the cliffs down to the water to fish.  Through my persistence, I was eventually able to drift close enough to this puffin to take its picture with my 500mm lens.  I like the dark green water and pink reflection of the cliffs on the water behind it.

Most photographers do not appreciate how difficult it is to photograph sea otters in Southeast Alaska.  Plenty of people, myself included, have photographed the approachable sea otters in California, but the “wild” ones in Alaska see you coming from a mile away and want nothing to do with you.  This is probably a good thing, since sea otters were previously hunted for their fur almost to the point of extinction.  I have watched rafts of hundreds of sea otters in Glacier Bay, near Cape Spencer, and in Frederick Sound, but none of them have allowed me to get close enough for a decent picture, even with a long lens.  After being frustrated so often by their elusive nature, I was surprised to find this cooperative mother & baby during my brief visit to Torch Bay last June while returning from my amazing Lituya Bay visit.  It was pouring rain, but fortunately I was able to set up my 500mm lens & tripod underneath the rain canopy on the back deck of my 22′ C-Dory while my friend Dominik Modlinksi manned the helm.  The mother repeatedly dove to the bottom to catch some food.  When she returned to the surface, it was all she could do to grab a bite of her catch before her little one voraciously snatched it away from her.  (It was kinda like me trying to eat ice cream around my daughters.)  After stealing mom’s food, the baby would climb on top of her for comfort & bonding.  It was a beautiful wildlife experience in a unique setting and I am happy that I came away with a few images.

This is a picture of my boat, Serenity, anchored in Lituya Bay in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska this past June.  It is a 22′ C-Dory Cruiser that I purchased in April 2007.  My wife & I bought it for our family, but also for my Alaska photography cruising ambitions.  My dad & I almost immediately motored it up the Inside Passage in May 2007.  (I grew up sailing on the Great Lakes in Michigan with him.)  After spending so much time and money to get it up to Alaska, I decided to leave my boat up there that first winter (07-08), which then became another summer & winter (08-09), and it is now headed into its 3rd winter.  Even if I had it down here in WA during the winter, I probably would not end up using it all that much.  So, it has stayed in Alaska.

Last week, my friend and fellow photographer Florian Schulz helped me pay to ship my boat & trailer from where it has been based in Juneau to Yakutat.  Our plan was to fly there this past Sunday and use it to visit Yakutat Bay, the Hubbard Glacier, & Icy Bay for the last 2 weeks of August.  All of these locations are situated at the top of the Gulf of Alaska on the southern edge of Wrangell St Elias National Park.  The park is the largest in the US National Park system and contains the largest ice-fields in North America.  Very few photographers get the chance to visit this area, so the opportunity for unique photographs is almost guaranteed.  Unfortunately, the weather turned from really nice to out-right terrible this week and we have decided to cancel our trip.  Both of us have spent enough time in Southeast Alaska not creating new pictures due to the rain that neither of us wanted to waste our time being up there.

Take a look at this GOES visible satellite map of Alaska from yesterday.  See the long “fire-hose” of clouds coming from the central Pacific north of Hawaii directly into the top of the Alaska panhandle?  This big storm is the remnant of the typhoon that caused so much destruction in Taiwan last week.  This general weather pattern is also the reason that so many glaciers exist at the top of the Gulf of Alaska.  The area tends to catch all of the big storms that roll in from the North Pacific.  Since my boat is so small, I have to be very conservative about using it to motor around on the open ocean.  For example, it took me over 2 summers to finally be able to visit Lituya Bay under perfect sea conditions this past June.  How long is it going to take for my Yakutat ambitions?

This is the current coastal marine forecast for the area.  It still does not look promising.  In case you do not spend as much time staring at weather forecasts and satellite views as I do, let me share a few of my favorite references.  I pretty much start my day by looking at weather.gov, the main weather site of NOAA.  If I am home in Seattle and thinking about going out to shoot for a day or 2, I look at several different forecasts, but most importantly WA’s visible satellite view.  I want to know what is out on the horizon over the Pacific or on the other side of the Cascades in Central WA.  I use this to anticipate if the clouds might open up and allow the sun to come through at the end/beginning of the day so that I can make dramatic images.  When it came time to fly up to Alaska the other day, I had been looking at the weather forecast all last week and saw that it was deteriorating with this big storm rolling in.  As much as I want to go up to Yakutat to use my boat, I am going to have to wait for another favorable weather window in the next month.  Regardless of whether I get the opportunity, my boat is going to spend the winter in the airplane hangar at the Yakutat airport waiting for me until the weather improves again next spring.  You can rest assured that come next April, I will be staring at the NOAA Alaska weather forecast waiting for a window of opportunity to head up north to use my boat and chase after dramatic landscape photographs.

One final note, if anyone is interested in joining me in Alaska next year, I am planning on getting my USCG 6-pac license this winter so that I can charter my boat out to clients interested in joining me on a unique photography tour.  More information to come in the months ahead.

I’ve been meaning to share this nice brown bear that I photographed during my visit in June to Lituya Bay on the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska.  My buddy and I spent several hours following this gorgeous bear as it worked its way along the shore eating grass.  We kept moving my inflatable to position ourselves to be able to shoot into the nicest sections of flowers, in case the bear happened to walk through them.  I really like the eye contact that I got in this image.  The bear was only about 15 meters away from us.  I tried to keep my 15hp outboard engine idling, just in case the bear decided it did not want to be photographed.  However, the engine died a few times, which made my nervous.  Whenever I am around bears I am always surprised how disinterested they are in me.  It is hard to convey that feeling to people who have never seen a bear in the wild.  I used my Canon 5D mkII, 500mm f4 IS lens, at f4, 1/160 sec, at ISO 400.  I was also hand-holding it, which gets hard with that big heavy lens.

One more note.  I will be at Glazers Camera in Seattle this Saturday from 10-2 as part of their Gitzo Days promotion.  I will be giving a free short presentation at 11.  Please stop by and say hi.

On my recent trip to Glacier Bay National Park, I returned with my boat to my favorite anchorage in the west arm of the bay at Reid Inlet to spend a few days exploring the beautiful scenery.  One of my favorite photographic locations in the park is the Lamplugh Glacier.  During my previous visits, I created some of my favorite landscape images on the moraine bar in front of the glacier at low tide.  I have also seen photos of lupine in bloom with the glacier in the background, but had never been there at the right time to see it for myself.  This time I was very fortunate that the lupine was going off!  I spent one overcast afternoon patiently sitting with my camera set up and my finger on the remote trigger waiting for the wind blowing off of the glacier to stop.  I was trying to shoot at something like f22, 1/6 sec, and ISO 200-400, but the wind just never completely died down to allow the flowers to sit still long enough for the picture I was after.  (I have zero tolerance for wide angle flower shots with flower movement.)  So, I came back the next day and was rewarded with a few long pauses in the wind that allowed me to create this beautiful photo.

After spending 5 days in Lituya Bay, we headed back towards Cape Spencer and Elfin Cove in very calm sea conditions, but heavy overcast clouds.  My cruising guidebook said that there were a lot of sea otters in Torch Bay, so since we were passing by we stopped to have a look.  Normally, sea otters in Alaska disappear when they see you coming from 1/4 mile away.  (This is probably a genetic trait of some kind from the few sea otters that survived the fur trade!)  We found some super friendly/mentally challenged sea otters that let us follow them around for a few hours.  I usually hand hold my 400mm f4 DO IS lens on the boat, but I had let another photographer borrow it.  Instead, I had his 500mm f4 IS lens.  This lens is not meant to be hand held for 3 hours.  Dominik was kind enough to pilot the boat while I set up my tripod and gimble head on the back deck.  I was also fortunate that my boat has an enclosed canvas back deck because it was raining while I was trying to shoot.  This is one of my favorite images.  The momma kept diving down to forage and when she returned to the surface she had to eat pretty fast before her baby came over and demanded its share.  Kids are all the same, aren’t they?

After trying to visit Lituya Bay the previous 2 summers, I was finally successful last week!  My friend Dominik Modlinski joined me for a 12 day cruise that included the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park.  My boat Serenity is a 22′ C-Dory, which is a pretty small boat for cruising in the Gulf of Alaska.  I needed a perfect weather forecast to insure our safety, and this time we got it.  After departing Juneau and cruising to Elfin Cove, we began the 60 mile journey up to Lituya Bay in calm seas, but low visibility.  We joked that we were cruising on a lake, rather than the North Pacific Ocean.  The NWS didn’t predict any big storms, so I knew that we were going to be able to safely run up and back within a week.

Lituya Bay is a spectacular location that few people visit.  It has a long dark history that culminates with the July 9, 1958 mega-tsunami that yielded the largest recorded wave in history.  The wave was initiated by an 8.3 magnitude earthquake which caused the mountainside at the head of Crillon Inlet to collapse into the bay.  The resulting “splash” sent a wall of water up the opposite mountainside to a height of 1,720 feet.  As the wave turned and continued, it destroyed every tree in it’s path up to 100 feet about the water before exiting the bay.  Three fishing boats were anchored near La Chaussee Spit at the time, and only 1 boat and its crew survived.

The native Tlingit people were afraid of Lituya Bay.  The pre-European Tlingits had a horror of death by drowning, which interrupts the soul’s cycle of cremation and rebirth, giving rise to baleful beings called Land Otter Men. Lituya Bay had many, and when angry they were known to shake the bay and flush it clean of living things.  Russians of the Bering expedition found the bay in 1741, but lost 15 men there in the vicious seas.  In 1786, the explorer La Pérouse also lost 21 of his men in the extreme tidal currents at the entrance to the bay.  In 1853 or 1854, a great wave swept the bay and killed all of the native inhabitants.  Other recorded waves came in 1899 and 1936, but by this time, no one lived in the bay any longer due to its fierce reputation.

With all this dark history on my mind, why then did I want to visit Lituya Bay you ask?  I have always been an adventurer whether it was extreme alpine climbing or swimming in the deep blue with whales & sharks.  I strive to visit places that are just a bit on the edge.  I am bored otherwise.  While in Lituya Bay, I definitely felt a bit uneasy by the history of the place.  I always felt the presence of the bay’s tragedies in my mind like a guillotine ready to drop at any unsuspecting moment.  However, the pure beauty of the place and the incredible amount of wildlife that I saw while visiting convinced me that it is a primeaval paradise.  These lupine in bloom along La Chaussee Spit at sunset one night are a testament to life’s eternal cycle of death and rebirth.  Lituya Bay for me was a dream realized.  I do not know if I will ever be fortunate enough to go back, but I hope to some day.

Here is 1 more very interesting panoramic image from my trip last month to Yosemite National Park.  It is one of my favorite images from the trip, but it is definitely on the abstract side.  One of those pictures that I almost walked past without taking.  I shot it with my Fotoman 6×12 camera.  What do you think?

In other news, I am heading up to Juneau, Alaska tomorrow for 12 days.  My painting buddy Dominik Modlinski is going to meet me on Tuesday.  We hope that the weather will cooperate enough to allow us to cruise to Lituya Bay on the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park like we tried unsuccessfully to do last July.  Wish me luck!

I got my copy of the May issue of Alaska magazine the other day with this sea otter image featured on pages 20-21! I took this photo last July while spending a week near Taylor Bay on the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park. It was raining and terrible weather, but at least I was stuck in a secure anchorage called Fern Harbor. I spent several days in a row following this sea otter around the bay in my inflatable. In the shallow water, I could sea him foraging underneath my boat and anticipate where he was going to come back up to the surface to get this shot. It was a lot of fun.

This image is available as a print on my website by clicking here.

I got rained on almost continuously for 15 days in July while waiting for a favorable weather window to make the dangerous run from Elfin Cove up the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park to Lituya Bay. I never got the chance. The reality of motoring around in the North Pacific in 15′+ seas just did not interest me. While passing away the time, I got to spend a few days in one of my favorite locations, Taylor Bay near Cape Spencer. It is an area of unimaginable beauty and pure wilderness. Rugged sea stacks on the coast meet glaciers that come down to the sea surrounded by 12,000′ mountains. Unfortunately, the weather made it impossible to shoot any spectacular landscape scenes, but I did spend a few days photographing the most uninhibited sea otter that I have ever encountered. Usually, sea otters will not let me get within 100 yards of them before they dive down to escape. I have no idea how they were almost exterminated when they used to be hunted. They are just so incredibly shy. This male let me follow him around in the pouring rain in my inflatable. He would swim from one side of the bay to the other all the while diving down and eating everything that he could catch. Sea otters need to eat something like 25% of their body weight every day. Often, he would be visible in the shallow water directly underneath my boat, so I could watch him forage and anticipate where he was going to come back up to the surface to photograph him. This is my favorite image. He captured 2 crabs and brought them back to the surface to eat. I caught this comical expression with his mouth open while eating. This image was created using my Canon 5D, 400mm f4 DO IS lens at f4 and 1/500 second.