Thursday, April 30, 2009

Alaska is...

September, 2008
Southeast Alaska is simply a wonderful pallet of textures, pattern, hues, shades, and colors. For a photographer the challenge is to capture the essence of a place that is constantly changing it's light and line. How to visually describe and capture the magic here in Southeast Alaska? Perhaps by starting with a sunrise over Admiralty Island...

Or by capturing the mists of a temperate rain forest.

The repeating patterns of the mountain ranges reaching for the sea...

or with frozen water being pulled by gravity to the sea as well. There are over 100,000 glaciers in Alaska many which end with their "toes" in the ocean!

It is a constant push and pull that forces the glaciers to finally calf and the water trapped in the glacier itself to return to the sea.

Ethereal blue light trapped in frozen water, marching towards the sea.

Literally thousands of tiny islands and islets dot the seascape of Southeast Alaska.

Making it a kayakers paradise as well as a photographers dream.

Perhaps more than any other physical feature to define the area is the nearly constant water that falls from the skies.

With no rain there would be no rainbows, so let it rain!

Glass-flat inside passage waters yield amazing patterns in the sea's surface!

And occasionally a sleepy little Southeast Alaska town will give a sense of what it is like to live here in this remote part of the United States.
Fiercly independent folks still make a living as their fathers and grandfathers before them did...fishing!

For many Southeast Alaska comes from the deck of a huge cruise ship. With over a million people visiting Alaska each year (almost twice the number of people visit as actually live in the state) the high-impact areas see a lot of tourist influence, like here in the state capital in Juneau.