Even I don't eat this well!

Captured in Seward, July 2007.

Nikon D50 | 70-300mm f/4-5.6G AF | f/5.6 | 1/1250 sec | 300mm | manual mode

The variety of bears that we encountered at Katmai National Park was just staggering. You could tell from watching them: they have distinct personalities. By and away our favorite bear was one that we nicknamed Mickey Mouse Bear.

Mickey Mouse bear looked to be a yearling cub, but mama was nowhere to be seen. By rights she probably should have been teaching him how to fish. Instead, he was going at it alone, and let's face it: he was not a good fisherbear. What he lacked in skill, however, he totally made up for in heart! He made more attempts at salmon than any other bear we saw that day, and even though we all wanted so badly for him to succeed, the fish just weren't swimming his way. During the hour or so we were on the lower viewer platform where he was fishing, there were many times where he perched up on a rock, bounded off across the river, stuck his face in the water, and tried like hell to catch some lunch. But even when he had just stuck his whole head in the water, his ears - oh, those ears - would still be disproportionally huge and fuzzy. In every photo I took of him (and there are probably hundreds) his ears are his most distinctive feature and they just make me want to go up, give him a huge hug, and fuzz up those ears even more.

Those fuzzy, fuzzy ears make me forget that he could - and would - totally eat my face.

Nikon D50 | 70-300mm f/4-5.6G AF | f/5.6 | 1/500 sec | 300mm | aperture priority mode

There were so many things I wanted to do when I lived in Alaska. However, the state is so huge and so full of natural wonders that it's impossible to see and do it all. Once I left, though, my biggest regret was not getting to Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula.

My first exposure to this area was when I was around eleven years old during a family vacation to Grand Teton National Park. We were staying in Jackson Hole and my parents became transfixed by the Thomas Mangelsen gallery there. I was totally taken in too and remember standing in front of his iconic photograph Catch of the Day, completely awed. Shortly after moving to Anchorage, I learned that that picture, and many others like it, were taken just a couple hundred miles away from my house. You had to take a float plane to get there, but you could get there all the same. I tried to talk my Mom, whose favorite animal is the Grizzly, into doing it and I redoubled my efforts once a couple of my friends took the trip and came back gushing about the experience, justifying the cost with cliche-sounding but totally true phrases like "once in a lifetime experience," but for some reason she resisted.

Fast forward to this last summer when Cory and I took a two-week vacation back to Alaska. In addition to the hikes and restaurants that were on our must-do list two big summertime experiences I missed out on during my time there: Denali and Katmai. Convincing Cory of Denali was no big thing: he was almost as eager to do it as I was. Katmai, however, took some doing. Eventually, though, I got him to agree to it, as apparently my once-in-a-lifetime logic (not to mention my stubbornness and persistence) began to justify the cost.

We contacted Steve Jones, the same pilot that my friends Dave and Amy used on their trip, and before we knew it we were on our way to the Alaska Peninsula. Let me tell you, I cannot recommend him enough. He was friendly, extremely knowledgeable, and a very proficient, experienced pilot: the trifecta Alaskan bush and float-plane pilots. He even remembered Dave and Amy from nearly two years before. He was also experienced with what happens on the ground: for instance, he knew to keep herding me along when I saw the first batch of mama/cub groupings far from the falls because if you stopped anywhere, you risked getting stuck there if a nearby bear necessitated a trail closure. So we pressed on until we got to the viewing platforms.

Words can't even begin to describe the experience we there, but luckily I took over 1,000 (yes, more than one thousand) pictures that day. If a picture is worth a thousand words then I have more than a million collected that should tell the story pretty well. I'll begin with one of the photos I took once we had gotten to the much-desired upper viewing platform, one of a brave mama bear breaking the rules of bear society, fishing with three cubs in tow so that she could continue to feed them. I gotta say, I like her style: just standing there, waiting for a fish to jump into her waiting jaws. I wouldn't do it much differently myself!

Nikon D50 | 70-300mm f/4-5.6G AF | f/7.1 | 1/640 sec | 250mm | aperture priority mode

Even on its coldest, wettest, most miserable summer days, Alaska is still a place that impresses and inspires awe.

On Cory's most recent visit we took the same wildlife cruise I took last year with my parents, and the weather could not have been more different. But even though it was rainy and foggy, the scenery was still amazing. The mountains all around were hiding their peaks in wispy fog, providing what may have been an even more interesting landscape.

Luckily, when we pulled into Holgate Arm to view the eponymous glacier, the glacial winds gave us a respite, which is good because my hands were almost so frozen that I couldn't use the camera in the first place. While we were viewing the massive ice formations around us, enthralled by the lone seal chilling on an ice floe just feet from the glacier, someone spotted a bald eagle above. I just started snapping pictures like crazy(er) and was very pleasantly surprised to capture this stunning, beautiful, and understated result.

Nikon D50

Cory was lucky enough to see some moose while he was here in June. Spare me the lecture -- in hindsight I know we were stupid to get so close to moose -- even though we were hiding behind the comfort of a 300mm lens, it's still not that far from a moose if you piss it off.

Anyway, we came across this bull whose antlers were growing in in west Anchorage on a beautiful day with incredibly soft and cinematic light, snapped about a hundred pictures, and two of them came out well.

Nikon D50

Selecting which seven photos to put in this entry was extremely difficult -- we had three separate encounters with whales on our cruise and I took well over 100 pictures between them. One encounter was especially exciting, with the whales breaching repeatedly, slapping the water with their tales, and rolling over and over like synchronized swimmers. It must have gone on for fifteen minutes. It was quite a show and it left everyone, even our jaded on-board National Park Ranger, in amazement.

I was so thankful to have this camera with me -- I had ditched the shutter lag of my previous digital point-and-shoot, and had gained shutter-priority and autofocus (not present in my trusty 35mm SLR) needed for these rapid-fire shots. This was a perfect day for it to strut its stuff!

Nikon D50

This was the time when my new camera, the Nikon D50, really got to strut its stuff and show what it's made of.

On a day cruise out of Seward, Alaska we saw an abundance of wildlife (many, many, many more pictures forthcoming). I loved the sea lions -- we could see their facial expressions, their whiskers, and their personalities (and the conflicts that they caused!). These scaled-down pictures -- 1/3 the original size -- don't do the day justice. If you want to see anything more closely in all its 3008x2000 pixel glory, I will be happy to accomodate.

Nikon D50