I stayed home the last 4 weeks, so I was able to accomplish some serious photo editing.  It has been hard work, but also fun reliving all of last years’ amazing adventures and discovering some real gems that I missed during my initial edits, like this bald eagle portrait.  I photographed this majestic bird during my Haines Bald Eagle Photo Tour last November.  My 3 clients all had a great time, learned a ton, & came home with some real keepers.  I already have requests from several people to go back this November.  Since I will not take more than 4 clients on my trips, space will be very limited.  If you are interested in joining my trip, please contact me.

This is another image that I created during my recent Death Valley National Park Photo Tour.  My 3 LA based clients unfortunately missed this photo opportunity because they drove home the day before.  My remaining client & I left the Badwater parking lot in the dark an hour before sunrise.  We wore our headlamps and hiked towards the center of the salt flats.  After 40 minutes, we stumbled upon these salt patterns and set up our cameras to capture the magnificent scene.  I like the textures on the salt flats, but I love the puffy sunrise clouds over the mountains.

I created this dramatic image on the Badwater salt flats during the 2nd morning of my recent Death Valley National Park Photo Tour.  My favorite landscape lighting scenario is the one that you see here, when sunrise light illuminates a mountain range underneath ominous clouds.  I could not have asked for anything more.  Over the next hour, the light interacted with the clouds giving me some very different images, but this early one is my favorite.  On my way to Death Valley, California photographer G Dan Mitchell was kind enough to send me a Facebook comment about looking for nice salt crust patterns around the first corner south of the Badwater parking lot.  I’m not sure if I found the exact spot that he was referring to, but I probably would not have parked in that area and walked the short distance from the road to these bizarre salt crust eruptions without his recommendation.  As the sunrise began, I was mostly walking back & forth answering my 4 clients questions, but I still managed to briefly set up my camera to capture the wondrous scene unfolding before me.

During my recent photography tour to Haines, Alaska, this was the only morning worth photographing landscape images, but the shooting conditions were extreme.  I had to lay on my stomach to get low enough to the ground to shoot this composition and the wind chill was at least -10°F.  I was also instructing my clients at the same time that I was setting up my camera.  For a few seconds, the low angle sunrise light briefly illuminated the foreground wind-blown snow patterns that I chose to frame the mountains.  I managed a couple of exposures before the light went back behind the clouds.  I continued my instruction until we all agreed that we could no longer feel our fingers or toes.  Brrrr!

Seriously, how did this image get on my memory card?  Full frame, no cropping, clean bokeh, & a perfect composition!  I am only averaging 6 opportunities each day to track a flying eagle.  This just goes to show you that you have to keep trying until you get it right.

I am having a great time with my 3 clients in Alaska on my bald eagle photography tour.  They are learning how to be real wildlife photographers.  The weather conditions are making it challenging to shoot.  There is a foot of snow on the ground and the skies are very dark.  There also aren’t as many eagles around this year.  However, between my 2 cameras, I still captured over 1000 frames today.  I have yet to capture a great eagle in flight shot, but I am trying.  So far, this is my favorite image.  This eagle posed for me for almost 20 minutes, which was enough time for me to get into a position for a clean bokeh background.  To complete the shot, all I had to do was wait for him to disapprovingly glare at me.

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.

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.

The last few weeks I’ve been busy with the Bellevue Arts Fair & our family vacation to Whistler, BC.  I am also going back up to Alaska on the 16th for two weeks, but before I go I wanted to post a few new pictures and stories.  This image is from Daniel Stainer, my photography workshop client who came out last month to spend a week with me in Olympic National Park.  We had some great days together.  Rainy afternoons spent in the Hoh & Sol Duc Rainforests, followed by interesting sunsets at Second Beach.  Here is what Dan had to say about working with me,

“If you’re looking for someone to just drop you off at some iconic location for a few hours of casual shooting, then Jon’s probably not your guy.  If you have a strong desire to push your photographic skills to greater depths while getting inside the head of a seasoned landscape pro, then Jon is exactly the right person!   From proper use of graduated neutral density filters and creative scene extraction techniques to aligning shooting opportunities based on a thoughtful interpretation of weather trends, Jon’s proven insight and deep explanations will help you master and fine tune your own photographic vision and approach, no matter what your current skill level.

While Jon is always sensitive to the physical capabilities of his participants, don’t expect to be sitting around for too long or hanging around some scenic overlook off the side of the highway, because Jon will have you hiking to that magical location at the perfect time of the day in search of epic light and unique dramatic landscapes.  As Jon likes to humorously say, “you’ll have time to eat and sleep later.”  Probably the two biggest lessons Jon taught me, were that the best shots require a tremendous amount of patience and often involve multiple visits; the second lesson is that you should not rule out shooting because of inclement weather, because things can always change for the better on the fly-which we learned firsthand when socked in gray and rainy skies made way for a brief sun break.    Aside from Jon’s superb hands-on teaching style, Jon is a great guy with an excellent sense of humor and laid back demeanor.    If you’re serious about your photography, then I cannot recommend Jon’s workshops highly enough.  You’ll be a better photographer because of them!” - Daniel Stainer, July 2009

Thanks so much for your kind words, Dan.  I had a great time, too.  I also want to share some of the video that I shot during our trip with my visitors.  For those of you that do not know, my new Canon 5D mkII has the ability to shoot 1080p video.  I’ve been dabbling with it this year.  Here is some of my footage.

This is another beautiful green temperate rainforest image that I took last week while leading a private photography tour of Olympic National Park.  This image is from the Sol Duc Valley on the way up to the iconic Sol Duc Falls.  About 1/2 way to the falls is a very scenic little stream covered in green moss that is often photographed.  About 3 winters ago, one of the big storms caused a terrible amount of flooding in the area, and a lot of the moss that covered the boulders was washed away.  I was out there last year and did not even take a picture while leading a private workshop.  This year, I decided to walk up hill to scout for better photo ops.  A good 10-15 minutes above the bridge that crosses the stream, I found some much more pleasing mossy boulders than lower down and proceeded to spend several hours taking pictures.

This is my favorite image.  This vine maple overhung a nice section of moss covered rocks and had some really cool delicate branches.  Even though there was no wind blowing, this image was incredibly difficult to photograph as the leaves were ever so gently bouncing, making long exposures blurry.  I was trying for the largest depth of field possible by shooting within 2 feet of the foreground leaves while trying not to fall into the stream on the slippery rocks.  I finally got one image while shooting at f16, 3.2 sec, and ISO 400.  You gotta love the backlit leaves during a photo shoot in the rainforest!  Also, you better like the color green.