We are heading out early tomorrow morning on our first road trip of the season. Since we camp out when we travel, we wait until the night temps are mild enough for comfortable camping. Early summer is the best in some ways since there are fewer mosquitoes and fewer people. We have to plan trips around rain storms, and this week should have some nice sunny days and my fingers are crossed for good clouds! We will stick to the Kenai Peninsula on this trip and revisit some of our favorite places.
My photo book A Back Road Traveler’s Alaska is now available for the Kindle Fire! Now that Kindle ebooks display color images, there is potential for photo books and I have another one in the works. It is priced at $2.99 with all proceeds going to the Alaska Wilderness League.
Reports said this would be a good season for aurora borealis (northern lights), and it was but they didn’t come when expected. We get e-mailed alerts, and often the lights didn’t show up when predicted but often a few days before. It is fortunate that we are night owls, since they often didn’t start until 2 am. Last week we had another surprise show which lasted a few hours, and this will probably be the last one since the night sky is getting lighter and it will be harder to see them.
I always get a window seat when flying over Alaska…It is wonderful to see the mountains, glaciers and vast roadless areas with forked waterways flowing to the sea. This shot was from the Kenai Peninsula.
We are signed up for email aurora alerts, but we did not receive an alert for this past Saturday night. Being a night owl, I happened to glance out the window at 1 am and saw a glow, otherwise we might have missed the show. We bundled up and grabbed our cameras. The northern lights got better and better, going from glowing patches to streaming, pulsing clouds with interesting patterns overhead and covering the entire sky. The following night we did get an alert, but the lights did not show up. I would like to drive and get something more interesting in the foreground than spruce trees, but there is no telling when we will see them, or if we will see them. Sometimes they are very brief and disappear before I can even get my camera out, and sometimes they go on for hours. If we head for the car, we might miss it all together. The elusive nature makes it even more special when we get a really good show!
Wikipedia says that shorebirds and waterfowl leave the Kachemak Bay for the winter, but we have been seeing more of them than ever before! This photo was taken in February, but we started noticing more birds even in January. Flocks of them fill the air and float on the water. When there is a ‘bait ball’ of small fish, they swirl around it to feed. Islands and Oceans visitor center in Homer has good information about shorebirds in this area.
When the sun shines, the snow sparkles and everything is fine.
The forecast was for snow, but instead the sun shone bright with wind rearranging puffy clouds. As we walked on the beach, a huge flock of gulls passed overhead and swirled all around us. It was one of those magical moments, and I was so glad to be there at that time and glad to be alive. I was glad to have my camera!
I just finished publishing my first photo book, A Back Road Traveler’s Alaska on Blurb (a print on demand site). It was a fun challenge to learn how to do it, and I want to do more! My next one will be more artistic… I started out just planning to show pretty pictures, but ended up writing captions and including information about some environmental issues. There are plenty of books with beautiful photos of Alaska, but you don’t usually get the whole story. I want to head in this direction next summer as we travel around Alaska. We plan to travel along the Haul Road following the pipeline to Prudhoe Bay, a route with much beauty sadly scarred with industrial development. Not my idea of the perfect vacation, but it feels important to see it.
The prices for print books at Blurb seem very expensive, too much for me to consider! All profits will go to the Alaskan Wilderness League. I am going to try to make a smaller and cheaper option, but then printing out books isn’t very environmentalist. My main goal is sharing and not selling, so the ebook version at Blurb is free! They only have it in epub format for ipads, but also put up a free PDF version at Issuu.
My new portfolio site is up, .Photographic Art by Michele S. Cornelius. I found out there is another photographer with a website under Michele Cornelius, so I added my middle initial to the domain name which is michelescornelius.com. I mainly wanted a place to put my portfolio and links to anything else I am working on. I will have a Blurb photo book about Alaska coming out very soon, and will put a link to it here. It isn’t perfect yet, but it is a start! This image is from a series I am working on titled “In Memory of Trees”.
Awake and Dreaming
Imagine Alaska
Natural Magic
