Alaska Photo Series Poll

Southeastern view from the Alaska Railroad,

between Denali National Park and Wasilla, Alaska

Whew doggies, we are catching our collective breaths and getting back to everyday living. To rest our weary bones and adjust from the four-hour time difference between Alaska and Tennessee, we have blessedly slept in the past two days. My consulting work resumes tomorrow, so a big Monday morning reality pill will be waiting for me to swallow!

While I begin the time-consuming task of sorting, deleting, and editing my Alaska photographs in spare moments, I will be sharing some more New Mexico images with you. And to help focus my digital editing priorities, I would appreciate your vote in the poll I have posted on my sidebar. It is conveniently located right below irrepressible Mr. Marty. Rather than focus on different locations, I plan to present three topical series: wildlife wonders, grand scenics, and Katmai brown bears. Thank you!

We're Back!

We’re back from our Alaska trip and dragging our behinds, LOL. We returned to our cottage yesterday afternoon, tired from an overnight plane flight. It was a spectacular journey. We were blessed with good weather the majority of the time and countless photo opportunities. I missed all my blogging buddies, of course! I attempted to keep up with your posts when internet access was available. I appreciate your patience during my long absence and all of your good wishes. Time is precious right now, so this post is short.

We saw an abundance of wildlife and marveled at all of God’s beautiful creatures. Needless to say, I also added to my collection of bear photographs! I may very well bore you with Alaskan images through the rest of the year. Can you take it?

Alaskan Adventure!

Isn’t this a delightful graphic of Mount McKinley?  The legendary peak is now called Denali, which is Athabaskan for “the high one”.  The image is scanned from a 1960 map cover that my husband purchased many decades ago.  The artist was Dwight Shepler, famed World War II illustrator.

We’re down to the wire now and will depart tomorrow on our grand Alaskan adventure!  Hubby has been preparing for the past few weeks and taking care of details while I’ve been working. I am scrambling today to pull all my stuff together and get packed.  We’re excited that this moment in time has finally arrived!

The journey certainly qualifies as a “trip of a lifetime”, and it is one that has been duly noted on our bucket list.  And those airline miles we have been accumulating over the years are finally being put to good use, LOL. We were so happy to find a tour company called Natural Habitat Adventures that specializes in adventure trips for small groups.  We think they have the best Alaska tour itinerary available – hands down, period. And we have traveling friends who took this trip a couple of years ago and they highly recommend it.  Natural Habitat runs a half-dozen or so of its Alaska tours each year, and we are going on the one specially designed for photographers!  We already know our guide from the grizzly bear trip we took last year in British Columbia, and he is a treasure.

We are going out several days early and staying several days later than the tour so that we can do some explorations on our own.  This vacation will be bittersweet for my husband because Fairbanks was his home during the 1960s-70s, and he will be seeing the blessed Alaska countryside again after all these years.  Every single thing on this trip will be new for me.  After going on a small boat tour of southeastern Alaska over fifteen years ago, I've had a small taste of the magnificent sights we will see on this adventure.

The itinerary will have us exploring interior Alaska and the coastline, including three national parks (Denali, Kenai, and Katmai).  Our modes of travel will include vehicles, train, floatplane, and boats.  We’ll see wildlife and grand vistas, glaciers and rainforests, tundra and mountains, rivers and lakes. We’re packing lots of camera equipment and digital storage media, of course!  Hopefully, there will be a little room left for taking some underwear.

We’re taking an iPad with us to periodically check e-mails.  But there will be limited internet availability throughout our travels.  My blog will go on a temporary vacation too.  Marty is in charge and will be minding the place. I will miss you all and I appreciate your good wishes!  Please visit me when I return and get an special armchair journey of the Alaskan frontier! 

Bambi Came for a Visit

As we were sitting down to dinner this evening, Bambi popped out of the woods and crossed a corner of our backyard!  We spotted it a couple of days ago, nursing with its mother, but I couldn't get a clear picture of it then.  This time, the fawn posed quite nicely for a few seconds.  Look at that precious little face!

When I went to post this a few minutes ago, I was shocked to see that Blogger has completely changed its navigation on the administrative pages.  And it took me a while to figure out how to do a new post!  My fingers are crossed that this gets published OK and that Blogger's improvements are all for the better. Sadly, I am already experiencing a new kind of formatting problem.  What it looks like in the "editor" screen is not what it looks like in the "preview" screen!

July - A Look Ahead

Mercy me, I am getting the “look ahead” post loaded up a bit late this month. There were too many other things to celebrate and share before this monthly feature! Last month turned out to be very busy, and it looks like I somehow exceeded my normal posting schedule. Whew! I hope all of that helps to make up for the meager blogging that will occur this month.

For my regular readers, you know why I will be AWOL. After this week, we’ll be gone for the rest of the month and cavorting in the wilds of interior and coastal Alaska. Except for regular watering, our flowerbeds and herb plants will get neglected. Our visiting hordes of hummingbirds will have to look elsewhere for food. The kitchen will be devoid of delicious smells and food. The computers will be sleeping. Activity at our cottage will come to a standstill. Undoubtedly, Marty will be running wild! 

We’ll be taking a regular ipad with us, but we will have limited availability of wireless connections or time. And I have been way too busy to line up a bunch of posts for publishing during our absence. So my dear blog will go on a temporary hiatus soon. 

My consulting work will be suspended during this period too. The break will be welcomed. I have been pretty much working full-time for a year now. It has been difficult to adjust out of my retirement routines, both physically and mentally. My original 6-month contract for this particular work assignment ends mid-month. But I have already agreed to an extension through mid-January. Then, I will happily return to retirement life once again. (I think, LOL.) 

We are looking forward to our grand Alaskan adventure! I’ll be posting about the trip itinerary later on this week.

Happy Fourth of July!

O'er the land of the free

and the home of the brave!

Happy Birthday to Hubby!

And may we celebrate many more together!

Photo Challenge: God Bless America!

It’s time for another Brenda Photo Challenge! This is the 4th of July weekend, so the theme is appropriately God Bless America! As a proud and patriotic conservative, I have been enthusiastically looking forward this! 

Hubby and I are collectively celebrating our birthdays right now, and a flag-designed dessert is taking center stage. The fruit on top helps to assuage any of our guilt for consuming the gooey frosting and chocolate cake. I quickly took a snapshot before we dug in! The camera settings were f/5.6, 1/30 second, and ISO 1000.

I recently read a photo magazine article about using displacement maps in Photoshop. I decided to try out the technique for the challenge. I tried a similar method several years ago, but this one is decidedly better. First, I grabbed and prepared an old stone wall photo in my inventory. This wall is actually a support for the Pisgah covered bridge near Seagrove, North Carolina (circa 1911 and one of two left in the entire state). I recommend that you never pass up the opportunity to take a texture shot like this. You may be able to use it later in your photo editing! 

Then, I merged another layer on top of this photo - a high resolution flag graphic available on the internet. Using Photoshop’s displacement magic, you can see that the flag takes on a 3D look and appears to be painted on top of the rocks. (Click to enlarge.) I also processed the image using a Nik Silver Efex plug-in filter. This step converted it to a black and white image. In the final steps, I selectively added back a low saturation of the red and blue colors on the flag, and also applied a soft sepia tone and vignette around the edges. The image of the rocks was taken at f/10, 1/40 second, and ISO 800. Pretty cool technique, huh?

Now that you have seen my contributions to the challenge, go to the web link and see God Bless America photos by the other participants!