10 Reasons I Love Alaska Winters
It has been a long, snow-less autumn. As a landscape photographer, I hate the shoulder seasons. After the snow melts in the spring but before things get green, it’s an ugly, brown, muddy mess. The departing winter has revealed six months-worth of trash lying around. It’s not a pretty time. The same goes for the transition from autumn to winter. Once the leaves drop, it’s just a bunch of dead brown lying around. Well, here in Anchorage, the leaves dropped over a month ago. We’ve had a record-setting warm October, and finally the temperatures are starting to drop. Now, as…
A New Age of Aurora Viewing
Back in 2002, I was only three years into being what I considered to be a serious nature photographer. What was that dividing line, you may ask? There were two things that happened that helped me to understand I was getting more serious. One was beginning to truly understand how light affected film, and the other was switching from color negative film to color slide film. I had only been living in Alaska for three years in 2002, and the experience was overwhelming. So many new sights, new places to explore and photograph, new friends, new work obligations, and a relationship that was…
Why Your Well-Intended Comments Won’t Work
Editor’s Note: The deadline looms for submitting comments to the EPA about the proposed Pebble Mine. You may be thinking that you’ve already done that. But your comments may be off the mark. It’s not too late to save your opinion from the scrap heap. Here’s what you can do. And do it BEFORE SUNDAY! In the upcoming days, you will see a frantic flurry of e-blasts, Tweets and Facebook posts urging you to tell the EPA to stop the Pebble Mine, to “help save jobs” in the commercial fishing industry. But these calls for action are not what the…
Open Thread – One Person’s Folly is Another’s Fortune
Happy Seward’s Day, Alaskans! And for the rest of you, please allow this post to serve as your permission slip to bail out of work early today. Just tell your boss we said it was OK. Seward’s Day is one of those “we’re going to force it to happen on a Monday” holidays that gives many Alaskans a nice three-day weekend, and a special grown-up treat – a day off while the kids are in school! The day commemorates the signing of the Alaska Purchase Treaty, on March 30, 1867. Newspapers at the time called Alaska “nothing but walrus covered…