Skagway is fun. You can take a heli ride to top of a glacier, train ride to Yukon and you can enjoy good seafood. This was taken just few minutes from the cruise ship. If you go north (the only way you can go) from the ship toward the town, there is a spot where you can capture all of these boats, water reflection and glacier curved mountains in the background. You can get better reflection in the morning when wind is calm. (Nikon D7000, Nikkor 18-200DX at 20mm, 1/100, f/11, ISO 125)
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I found a spot in a rainforest in Alaska where the light was penetrating through the trees and illuminating the shorter plants. The trees and foreground are naturally darker than green leaves of the short plants, too. Those made the natural vignette. I did further processing on my computer to enhance the vignetting effect. They are working together to act as a nice frame for the green plants. (Nikon D7000, Nikkor 18-200mm at 32mm. f/5. 1/200. ISO = 1600, handheld)
After chasing whales for hours, taking their pictures, I realized that most of the pictures I took look the same. I needed something different and interesting. Here, I took a picture of people on a separate tour on a different boat looking for the whales. Even though the main focus in on those people on the boat, my eyes naturally move toward the middle of the picture, at where all those people seem to be looking. Maybe, that's where they saw the whales last. Or maybe, they saw the shadow. Maybe, their tour guide directed them that direction. I can make up a lot of stories from this picture. (Nikon D7000, Sigma 150-500mm at 150mm f/9.0, 1/500, ISO = 400) The reason for this weird set up is that I was shooting moving whales, so that the high shutter speed was needed and long tele zoom was left on.
One of my favorite B&W picture comes from my film camera, Nikon F100. I used a positive slide film (Fuji Velvia 50) and scan the picture into Jpeg. I used a high quality scan to make this pic 30MP equivalent. I converted the colored scanned image into B&W by simply reducing the saturation to none. I didn't use any special software for this B&W pic. The grain is real, coming from the film. (Nikon F100, Nikkor 20mm 1:2.8D, Fuji Velvia 50)
I took this picture from a train departing from Skagway, Alaska to Yukon at the Canadian border. This is an old train track that they no longer use (obviously). Because my train, where I'm shooting this picture from, was moving, I had to set my shutter speed at < 1/500 to freeze the photo to avoid blurring. (Nikon D7000, shutter priority mode, Nikkor 18-200mm at 18mm, 1/500 f/5)
A whale shooting (pictures, of course) is fun. I did a photo tour in Juneau, Alaska. The guide was a naturalist who can not only teach us technical aspects of how to take pictures of whales, but also taught us a lot about nature and environment, so that we can try to "tell stories" in our pictures. For taking pictures of whales, she taught us to set the camera to the shutter priority mode and set the shutter speed to 1/500, iso to 400 and fire continuous shutters when we start seeing the humpback. The tail follows immediately after the humpback. Use the naked eyes to spot the whales first (spouting water) and move your eye to the viewfinder and look for the humpback in the viewfinder. It's hard first but there are many opportunities to practice here in Alaska. (Nikon D7000, Sigma 150-500mm at 500mm, 1/500, f/10, handheld, no VR)
I never thought there were a lot of huge rocks on top of a glacier. This was one of the glaciers in Skagway, Alaska. I wanted to express the depth of this scenery, using small aperture and trying to focus on the large field. The color of rocks give some unique contrast on top of very monotonous ice. (Nikon D7000, Nikkor 18-200mm at 36mm, 1/600 f / 13, handheld, no filter, no post adjustment)
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