My Mother-in-Law took this picture...
Over the last year and change I have been working on a project selecting and processing pictures from our 2009 family vacation in Alaska. When I got back from the trip I completely underestimated how long this would take to get these pictures ready. I shot over 10,000 images on that trip, and there were plenty that required a lot of work in Photoshop.
Hands down Alaska is my favorite place to visit. Missy thinks I am crazy but I think I could live there. Since my first trip, a cruise for our honeymoon, I’ve always wanted to go back. And, after going back, I can see where I could make a regular habit of it as long as it didn’t involve another cruise. Don’t get me wrong, I like cruises fine, they’re certainly fun if you like to eat a lot and ride on a big ship for a week. And sure, who doesn’t like endless reruns of The Love Boat? Then there’s the closet sized bathroom with the scary vacuum toilet and itty-bitty kiddie sized shower. So yeah, cruises are cool, but the people who design them fix it so you get not quite enough of what you’re really there to do because they have to get you to the next stop on time. It ends up being a nice little sampler of what you could have done if you weren’t tied to someone else’s schedule.
So there we were, in Alaska… me and three women - Missy, my mother-in-law, and my Auntie Sharon, whom Missy invited along to be her mom’s room mate. The three ladies disappeared a lot, going off to do their own thing. The result of this was 10,021 individual pictures shot by me.
So okay, 10,000 pictures… Even I was surprised by that. But hey, if you want pictures, ya gotta shoot. So I knew this would be a big project, even when I promised people I’d be done processing by last Thanksgiving. I really had no idea it would become as involved as it did. I got the first few days done in well, a few days. Then came the glaciers. Big, massive, blue photographic nightmares, every one of them. Glaciers. Glaciers shot on a sunny day, with nasty shadows, blown out highlights, and of course color casts. Then there were glaciers shot on cloudy days, still somehow with shadows and worse color casts. Blue, white, brown, with silt infused waters in the front… Crevasses and cracks trapping light… Blown out highlights on otherwise underexposed shots… The printable ones all ran through a massive salvation effort in Photoshop, and it took forever to get through it. Those middle days of the trip took several months each to complete.
And now, I am done, and the day has come for me cut these loose into the wild.
I broke this project down by each of the 12 days of the trip. I’ll let one of them go at a time to, you know, build suspense (or more like prevent overload). I’m starting with snapshots that were taken by Missy and her mother. If you’re part of the family and only care about the silly posed pictures where we look back into bright sunlight and force smiles, this is where you’ll find those. I'm getting these out there up front. If you want to see dorky shots of me? Yeah those are here too, including that one at the top of this post, which was taken by my mother-in-law, which I find oddly hysterical.
Then after that, it’s my images, day by day:
Day 1 - Vancouver
Day 2 - At Sea
Day 3 - Ketchikan
Day 4 - Juneau
Day 5 - Skagway
Day 6 - Glacier Bay National Park
Day 7 - College Fjord
Day 8 - Talkeetna
Day 9 - Talkeena Three River Boat Tour
Day 10 - Denali National Park
Day 11 - Denali to Fairbanks
Day 12 - Fairbanks to Chena Hot Springs
I'm picking out the best 14 of each set, leading with those posted to my facebook account. The entire shoot for each day will be posted back to Flickr. Gimme a couple days between postings to get everything ready.
And so, for my Aunt Carolyn, who finally gave up oh, about February of this year on ever seeing these, and for my cousin Risa, who grew up in Alaska and misses it every day, for my traveling companions on this trip who in spite of their disappearance each at one point or another had to wait around for me… and for my friend Vicki, who can now stop giving me a hard time asking “hey when are we going to see those pictures from Alaska?”, here we go…
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| Click here to see the whole snapshot set on Picasa... |
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