Northern Norway

Some photos I took while doing field work in northern Norway...

One of the first lakes we went to, I love the mist on the water and really want to live in that little white house. (In the summer, anyway.)

This lake is called "Melavatn" and while this was by far the prettier half of the lake, there were far fewer fish to trap on this side so we spent a lot more time on the other side.

This is the view from the kitchen window of the house we were staying in. Taken at approximately midnight. Pretty cool shadow pattern on the mountains.

And on the way home, going down the Lofoten archipelago. Taken from a car window with a crappy point-and-shoot because my SLR was out of battery and we were camping, so I unfortunately can't fix the blown out sky, but the bird was such a stroke of luck that I think it's worthy of internet-posting anyway. :)

Spring Break in Scotland

Some people go to the beach, some people go home, but for me the UK was the perfect place to spend Spring Break. I stayed with a Clarkie in London and then went to visit an old childhood friend, Kelsey, who moved to Edinburgh back when we were in high school.

This is me and Kelsey. I hadn't seen her for five years when I went to visit her. An Alaskan man (who was very impressed that I'd been to his home state!) took this for us at Edinburgh Castle.

Inside Edinburgh Castle.

I stayed at Kelsey's university for a few days. She goes to St. Andrews, and this is the view from the train station platform when we arrived. She said that when she first took the train to school, she thought she'd gotten off at the wrong stop because it looked like the middle of nowhere.

These are the ruins of the St. Andrews Cathedral, down the street from Kelsey's apartment.

Kelsey was really excited that there were blue skies. I definitely was, too!

This is what we arrived at when we left the ruins. This road next to the ocean is Kelsey's jogging route. Makes one a little jealous.

...I guess Scotland is kind of pretty.

And this is the beach right next to St. Andrews' Old Course. See the swans in the bottom left of the picture? So cool.

Me waiting for my train on my way back to London.

Adirondack Mountain Boonies

These images are from a trip to the Adirondack mountains earlier this winter. My aunt, her husband, and my grandmother on my mom's side of the family live out here, so we try to make the trip out there at least once or twice a year. I got some good shots when I went on a drive around the lake that they live on with Siblings no. 2 and 3.

Rolling hills and a frozen lake.

Sibling no. 3. The clouds made this lovely diffuse light.

Here the sun is trying to break out, leaving those great shadows on the snow. These old barns are just gorgeous. I managed to grab this one while hanging out the car window, telling my brother (sibling no. 2) to drive more slowly so I could frame it properly. Lo and behold, all I had to do was crop out the edge of the road. I've developed good reflexes for that after a lot of shooting from a car in Alaska two summers in a row, when we can't stop because we're late going to our next lake!

And the last one is an outtake - this is what happens when my sibs want to take a picture of me. They never get a good shot of me because I'm too busy telling them how to use (read: how not to break!) my camera.

Clark photos

So since I'm TAing Frank's Advanced Digital class this semester, I figured I should be a team player and start up my blog again, too! I'll be posting what I'm taking, or in the absence of shooting (I'm a busy girl!) I'll be posting old things that I haven't posted before - likely from my second trip to Alaska this past summer, just cause they're so purty.

For now, here's a few photos of our own Clark University in the snow that I shot for the admissions department last weekend. They told me to just go out in the snow whenever the next snowstorm was because their literature is too devoid of wintery pictures. So when I woke up and saw a blanket of snow outside, I threw on sweats over my PJs so I could beat the sand (pictures of muddy snow are far less attractive) and wandered campus for a few hours shooting.

This is a classic Clark shot of our most iconic building, Jonas Clark Hall. Hopefully this is a slightly new angle in terms of photos of this building - usually it's seen from head-on, but from this angle I thought it looked a little more secluded.


Freud, also classic. It takes a lot of snow for Freud to get snowy since he's got a very slick finish. I was mostly interested in getting people in the background - I didn't want it to look like campus is a deserted wasteland when it gets snowy.

More people - I was impressed that I did manage to get people walking around on campus as it was Sunday morning.

I think this one is one of the prettiest ones that I got, but it's probably a lot less usable for Clark's purposes since there are no students in it. I'll give it to them anyway - maybe they could use it in the school calendar or something.

A little globe.

So I saw people doing this on flikr and decided to try it myself. It's a long and arduous process (as is anything fun in photoshop) but it's got a great result. I made maybe ten of these, but this one came out the best - probably due to the nice amount of grass that I could stand in the middle of. It doesn't work nearly as well with a lot of buildings or tall things, it's better if the any objects (trees, buildings etc.) are enclosed in the frame. Which is very difficult with the lens I have! So this is Crystal Pond, otherwise known (to all Clark students anyway) as Dead Hooker's Pond. Although I hear that the dead girl wasn't actually a hooker, so... call it that at your own risk, I guess!

Elm Park

I took these on Friday for STIR magazine's spring issue, so the goal was to make the fact that it's winter and the ponds are entirely frozen as inconspicuous as it could possibly be. I didn't even have any blue sky on Friday to help me out so I could focus on that and try to avoid the ponds, so the writer of the article and I decided that the best way to go about this was to use sepia tone. That way they maybe look like they're historical photographs, and it's not as silly that it's clearly winter. It was actually fun to be able to take shots from the middle of the ponds since they were so frozen. I was a little nervous the ice would break and I'd fall in and destroy my camera (not to mention most likely get hypothermia!), but luckily I didn't and the shots came out pretty well. I guess if I want to recreate them after the ice melts I'll have to find a canoe somewhere!

Moose!

I was very upset when I missed seeing my first moose because I was singing along to "Like A Prayer" too loudly to hear the grad student in our lab tell me from the backseat when we drove past one. Luckily a few days later I was in the car when these three burst out of the woods and ran right past the car, and I finally saw my first moose. And three at once! I couldn't be mad at Madonna for long anyway. In this one you can see the trees in the background are still all burned from the huge forest fire they had there a few years ago. There were actually several forest fires when we were there, too, but they weren't as bad.

Kashwitna Lake

This is Kashwitna Lake, which we stopped at on the way back from Talkeetna. This is just about the darkest I ever saw it get in Alaska, it was about 12:30am when I took this. Plus I was underexposing to get more cloud detail, so it was lighter out than it looks in these images, especially the first one. It was just such a striking lighting condition! I can't wait to print out the panoramic image really huge when I get back to the printer that can handle doing it for me. It was my first time trying to stitch images together, and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be, although it did take a little bit of fixing afterwards. Hopefully the trouble areas aren't too apparent!

Morvro Lake

There's no public access to Morvro Lake, so we were looking over our shoulders for the owners of this property the entire time we did water quality. Luckily they didn't show up while we were carefully tiptoeing through their yard to get to the lake! Of course we did knock on the door first to ask them if they minded, but no one answered. It was very nervewracking to be watching over my shoulder while pipetting water from the lake into tubes in the back of our van, which we'd parked next to their two old pickups in their huge gravel driveway which bordered on parking-lot size. They probably would have thought we were crazy if they'd come home! It didn't help thinking about what a rural place we were in; one of my professors has had a couple guns pulled on him before in Alaska while trying to get to one lake or another. Funny, a bunch of fish scientists doesn't seem very threatening to me!

Lazy Lake

Ironically, if you're actually lazy, you'd never get to Lazy Lake. To take these pictures I was struggling to hold two jars of fish and the plankton tow in one hand while
grabbing my Rebel with the other from around my neck. I couldn't zoom with only one hand, but I managed ok. Jana is carrying her macroinvertibrate net to catch bugs and Lauren is carrying ten quarter-inch minnow traps, which is what we use to trap the fish we then collect and study. She and Jana are wearing waders because Lazy Lake is so swampy that if you don't wear them you can't get close enough to the bank to throw the traps, let alone collect. I was wearing regular boots and barely made it without getting my boots full of water.

South Rolly

Wow, I'm really awful at this every-day thing! I think it's because I'm not on a regular schedule up here, so it's hard to remember to do much of anything except eat. And even that I sometimes forget to do!

Anyway, this is at South Rolly lake, which has a campground on it, so there are people everywhere. It was actually kind of awkward pulling out the water quality stuff, test tubes and pipettes, because everyone looked at us like we were insane. We did the algae tow off of this dock which (as you can see) had kids crawling all over it - Jana had a hard time not hitting them swinging the tow! It was really gorgeous, as you can see, although Lauren told me I was creepy to take pictures of other people's children. :)

The dock.

These are also at Camp Lasda, on Kelly Lake. In the first image Jana is filling bottles of water so we can do our water quality tests on them. We actually have a cooler full of pipettes and test tubes and even a portable suction unit in the back of our car to do the water quality, it's really pretty cool. Well, cool in a horribly nerdy sort of way, as we sit at the edges of these lakes and squirt water into test tubes and erlenmeyer flasks with our pipettes! In the second one, she's collecting algae in her tow, which requires her to swing the tow around her head before throwing it out into the water and then dragging it back to shore (or in this case, dock) to collect the algae in the tow's net.

Camp Lasda

Not trapped in a petri dish yesterday! :) This was actually at a seemingly abandoned camp that has lake access. We had to cross these tracks to get to the lake front from the main bit of the camp, which made me a little nervous. Visions of campers scampering across railroad tracks to get to the beach... It's probably better that it's been abandoned!

Anchor Point continued

I got around to editing the other Anchor Point photos while in the lab today. In the second image you should be able to see three bald eagles. We think we saw at least seven there at once, all circling around. Of course the two guys that worked there thought nothing of it while we all freaked out. One eagle actually swooped right in front of our van while we were all eating lunch, and its wingspan was looked longer than the van was wide. It was incredible. The third image is a tractor backing into the ocean to pull out a boat, which is what the two guys that work there do. I guess there's no way for the little fishing boats to get out of the water without being pulled out by these tractors that wait by the ocean with a radio for calls from the boats. They have these hitches, two of which can be seen (sans tractor) in the last image, that the boats drive straight into once the tractors are in the water. It's really an amazing sight, the tractors just drive straight into the ocean until you'd swear the engine must be submerged and completely destroyed, but then they manage to come back out again, while towing a boat.

Anchor Point

This is the westernmost highway point in the United States! Unfortunately (note the ominous clouds) the weather was a bit nasty, so we didn't stay overnight like we'd planned so I'm back in Anchorage. We went, we collected the fish, and we came back. Ten hours of driving in one day is a little exhausting, but luckily the driver, a post-doc named Matt, was a fellow photographer, so he kept stopping the car and we'd all get out and photograph the scenery. He and I have matching rebels, but he's got several lenses and I only have the kit lens, so I developed a bit of lens envy every time I couldn't get a shot as wide or telephoto as I'd like. Once I'm actually making money I'll be able to trick out my camera, too! Anyway, I have a lot more images from the trip, but I don't have the energy to edit them all, so this is all you get for today. It's definitely my favorite of the day, though.

The field!

Today I was in the field. The field that scientists are always talking about, yet I had never been to. It was great fun! I clambered around three different lakes and pulled in traps and then sorted and collected stickleback. Then we took them back to the lab to run trials on, some of which I also did today, but still. NATURE! It was fun. I even got to see Anna Lake, which was lovely. Here are three that I feel are sort of a series. The second two are Justin, a grad student, wading into Lynne lake to fill a cooler full of fish with more water for transportation back to our University of Anchorage lab. See all the little stickleback fish in the closeup of the cooler? I love the way they huddle together. And I love the reflections of the sky in the water.

Much better than flying over the ocean.

So because it's all I have so far, I give you the view out of my plane window. Lovely, huh? I about died when after seeing patchwork fields for hours I looked out of my window and saw this. Now it's time to go do some quality researching!