 | Welcome to my 2001 trip to Alaska!
Yes, I decided to do Christmas in Alaska. Well, you know, to get away from the winter cold of Indiana. And as things turned out this was exactly true!
Anyway, getting there was uneventful. Yea there some extra security and military guards in charge of screening and all, which was cool, but other than a really bad flight schedule, travel was easy. But what a schedule! Lafayette to Detroit. Detroit to Minneapolis. Minneapolis to Anchorage. Way too long of a trip! Oh well, that's what one gets with a free ticket (airmiles) I guess.
I got in after dark, well after dark for this time of year so no pictures of course the first day. It as -6 degrees which was warmer than the previous weeks, but unfortunately the next day a storm came in and warmed things up. Warmed things up quite considerably. 36 degrees and rain on Christmas Day! Yuck.
Well, no matter it was Christmas Day so presents were in order. Presents for all, including Sidra who had lots of fun opening her presents under the tree.
After presents, a short hike down to Thunderbird Falls. It was still quite beautiful there. I just brought along my Nikon D1x digital camera and a couple wide angle lenses. I found my 20mm was best because I could shoot at 1/60 or slower and not have to worry much about camera shake. However it was so dark and overcast that I ended up setting the camera at and ISO of 800 for most of the photos. I also found it to be very, very blue. Even though I had an 81B filter (which is designed for open shade color correction) I still had to set the camera to open shade color correction or I just got completely blue photos. It is amazing how our brains automatically correct for changes in light. To our eyes the snow looked white, but to the camera it was blue even with so much color correction everything should have been orange! However, I like the result of a tinge of blue left by the combination of 81B and open shade color correction. In some images I corrected further with Photoshop and took out even more blue, but in others I left things as the camera saw it -- very, very blue.
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However, if I used auto levels and then desaturated the image followed by adding just a little blue back in... Well, you can see the results between this unaltered image and the one which was 'Photoshopped'.
