Lance Warley
09-26-2009, 12:02 PM
Canon 5D II + 70-300 @95mm, F11, 1/1250, ISO 400
We just returned from a wonderful trip to Alaska's Inside Passage on the National Geographic Sea Lion. It's a small ship that holds 60 passengers plus 6 naturalists and three professional photographers, including a National Geographic photographer. We sailed from Sitka up to Juneau and then back down to Seattle. They put us on zodiaks and kayaks to explore inlets and bays each day.
We saw numerous humpbacks and killer whales, along with brown bears and black bears hunting the waters for salmon. It was amazing. We also saw two glaciers - the Johns Hopkins glacier in Glacier Bay National Park and the Mendenhall glacier in Juneau.
The most amazing thing of all was the sheer sense of remoteness. Some days, we saw no other people and no other ships.
The entire area is one huge temperate rain forest. There was good light for maybe a total of 30 minutes out of the whole 12 days. The National Geographic photographer told us he generally gets good light on 3 days out of every 100 he spends in the field. The local saying is, "There's no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate attire." You gotta love it.
The weather wasn't the only photographic challenge. It's really interesting to try to get long exposures of landscapes from a moving boat or zodiak. Tripod? Yea, that's a good one.
The entire experience was incredible. I'll probably post another one or two shots from the trip here and then I'll put all of them on my web site.
Thanks for looking, everyone.
We just returned from a wonderful trip to Alaska's Inside Passage on the National Geographic Sea Lion. It's a small ship that holds 60 passengers plus 6 naturalists and three professional photographers, including a National Geographic photographer. We sailed from Sitka up to Juneau and then back down to Seattle. They put us on zodiaks and kayaks to explore inlets and bays each day.
We saw numerous humpbacks and killer whales, along with brown bears and black bears hunting the waters for salmon. It was amazing. We also saw two glaciers - the Johns Hopkins glacier in Glacier Bay National Park and the Mendenhall glacier in Juneau.
The most amazing thing of all was the sheer sense of remoteness. Some days, we saw no other people and no other ships.
The entire area is one huge temperate rain forest. There was good light for maybe a total of 30 minutes out of the whole 12 days. The National Geographic photographer told us he generally gets good light on 3 days out of every 100 he spends in the field. The local saying is, "There's no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate attire." You gotta love it.
The weather wasn't the only photographic challenge. It's really interesting to try to get long exposures of landscapes from a moving boat or zodiak. Tripod? Yea, that's a good one.
The entire experience was incredible. I'll probably post another one or two shots from the trip here and then I'll put all of them on my web site.
Thanks for looking, everyone.