Bear viewing at Anan Creek

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A couple of years back my brother and I, more or less on a whim, decided to spend a few days visiting Stewart on the BC / Alaska border to see what the bear viewing was like at Fish Creek. We didn’t have much idea what to expect, but it turned out to be way more interesting than we could have imagined! Thus began a mild obsession with bears, which last year saw us visit Pack Creek near Juneau, and this year saw us snag lottery permits for Anan Creek on 9th August.

The best way to visit Anan Creek, IMO, is to stay at the Forest Service cabin at the site. The web booking is first come, first served, and you need good luck as it’s understandably popular. We failed, and instead visited on a day trip from Wrangell. We flew with Sunrise Aviation – the only air charter option in Wrangell (though boat trips are also possible) – who were great. I still find the whole idea of hiring a float plane to get places rather cool!

Black bear in cave at Anan Creek

Once at the creek, the bear viewing was first rate. It’s mostly black bears (though we saw a couple of browns), and apart from one lull around mid-day of maybe an hour there were bears out fishing throughout the time we were at the site. The far side of the creek opposite the viewing area is a jumble of mossy rocks and caves, and it’s pretty easy to get the standard Anan shots of bears peering out of dark crevices and fishing below the waterfall. The cub peering out of the cave above was my favorite shot. Lens-wise, 300mm on full frame works pretty well. I had a 1.4 teleconverter but didn’t use it at all; my brother used a 2x for a few shots but also mostly shot with a bare 300mm. You can sign up for half hour stints in a hide down at the water level, and there 200mm is plenty.

Brown bear at Anan Creek

Overall it was a great day of bear viewing, and of the places I’ve been to the easiest to take good standard pics of bears fishing. I’m not sure what sort of unique images you could hope for there, though I guess with enough time you might get lucky and catch some interesting interactions between bears. Compared to Pack Creek, the photography was easier at Anan but it didn’t feel quite as wild and remote a setting – at Anan Creek there are a lot of visitors coming and going on brief commercial tours that you don’t get at Pack Creek.

If you’re interested in visiting, here’s the link to the Anan Creek info from the Forest Service.

Night at the Boulder Flatirons

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I’ve noticed previously that it never gets truly dark at the Boulder Flatirons. Even on a moonless night, light from the city illuminates the rock and any clouds above. Tonight there were light patchy clouds drifting south, which tempted me to try another stacked exposure but this time with the added element of the clouds. I think this might have been better if the cloud had been low enough to roll over Green Mountain (in which case I’d have gone for a tighter shot), but happy with the result.

Technical details: 20 x 30s exposures, 18mm, f/3.5 at ISO 400, stacked with StarStax.

Merseyside

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Quick trip over to West Kirby in the Wirral yesterday. An oddity here is that the tide goes out a long way, and there are three islands (one big enough to have houses) that you can walk out to at low tide. Lots of people do. Of course there are plenty of tide pools, and I had in my mind an image similar to this one of refelctions in Death Valley. Too much wind (and cloud) meant there weren’t any reflections, however, and my favorite image was instead a wide angle shot processed for a slightly dreamy look:

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Meanwhile the Mann Island development on the Liverpool waterfront continues to provide amusement. With some low clouds and light pollution it takes on a Bladerunner-like look:

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Looking for a new angle…

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Just back from a long weekend in Pisa. It was my first visit to the city, but of course I had a pretty good (!) idea what to expect. The central area – the Piazza dei Miracoli – was more beautiful than I expected, and the Leaning Tower is, well, remarkably non-perpendicular. As ever at such a place, it’s a fun but basically hopeless challenge to come up with a new photographic angle. Failing that, I followed the usual advice: at an iconic locale, you only need to hint at where you are. My best pic, I think, was this piece of whimsy… tourists posing for the humorous photo of holding up the tower.

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Dada did better. With a small sensor Nikon compact low in the grass, she came up with this image than may not be original but was at least new to me!

(I tried to replicate this with a DSLR but it can’t be done… it really only works with a small camera.)

Photography to one side, Pisa and the nearby towns (Siena and Lucca) were simply wonderful. A great weekend.

Southern Italy

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A few days of vacation in Southern Italy, starting from Naples then on to the Amalfi Coast (beautiful, but very busy even in June!) and the region south of Taranto in Puglia. Quite an abundance of photo opportunities here: beautiful coastlines, historic cities (Lecce and especially Matera), and general “southern Italy” images.

StarStaX software

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Shooting star trail photos on film required a generous measure of luck (or experience) to judge whether the reciprocity failure inherent in a lengthy exposure would give a pleasing result. Digital capture makes the process apparently much simpler – you simply shoot a large number of almost consecutive exposures and stack them after the fact to mimic the effect of a long single exposure. The problem is how to treat the foreground. For the sky, “stacking” just means taking the maximum value at each pixel across the sequence of images. If its truly dark, applying the same algorithm to the whole frame will generally give only a silhouette for the foreground, since even at high ISO 20 or 30 seconds won’t be enough. So, instead, you might (a) start the sequence when there’s still a little light in the sky and stack for the maxima (in which case frame #1 will give the whole image, with the rest just contributing the trails), or (b) additively stack the frames to give the equivalent of a super-long exposure without reciprocity failure. In either case, there’s no such thing as a “real” image and it’s an aesthetic decision how bright the foreground is relative to the sky.

Enough theory, here’s my first attempt… looking north toward the Flatirons and Boulder from the Flatirons Vista trail south of town:

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To make this image, I stacked 150 20s exposures (ISO 3200, f/5.6, about 135mm) starting about an hour after sunset. My 5D Mk3 didn’t seem to like shooting at 21s intervals (perhaps overhead with high ISO noise reduction?) so the intervals were 22s and as a result there are some gaps evident in the full resolution file. The images were then stacked using StarStax (very simple, free, and does what it says on the box).

On the road to Dinosaur

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A weekend in Steamboat Springs and the north-western corner of Colorado. Didn’t have time to do any landscape photography in Dinosaur National Monument, but Dinosaur Quarry – where fossilized bones have been left exposed in the rock of an ancient stream bed – is well worth seeing. Memo to myself: there are a lot of aspens around Steamboat… worth coming back in the Fall!