I have shared images of the wildlife and scenery from Alaska, but not shared the really cool images of the amazing icebergs and glaciers that we saw on the trip. Well...today is the day that I share those images showing the beautiful blue colors and crystal clear formations with you all.
As we our boat got closer and closer to the glaciers, we started seeing small pieces of ice in the water. We would try to find unique ways of photographing them against the backdrop of the rocks along the edge of the water.
We all had a great time looking for the unique shapes in the pieces of ice.
We were also excited to see the beautiful blue colors appearing in front of us.
As we came close to those pieces of ice, I encouraged everyone to zoom in tight (like many of my guests, I was using the
Canon R5 MKII and
Canon RF 100-500mm lens) to get photos like this. The ice almost looked like polished glass or diamonds.
We also saw some wildlife on the ice formations, like these birds hitching a ride...
...and this pup who was just hanging out on the ice.
Normally there would not be large pieces of ice up on the shoreline, but about two weeks before our trip, there was a very large landslide that create a tidal wave in the passage and pushed a lot of the ice onto the shoreline.
As you can see, the pieces of ice got much larger as we got closer to the glaciers.
The first glacier that we saw was cool, but a little dirty since there had not been any snow in a while.
It was still cool to the see the blue color coming out of the walls of ice.
Then we came upon a much larger glacier and we were all blown away. Look how pretty that one piece of ice looks in the foreground, with the clear ice with a ball in the middle.
We all had a blast photographing the intense blue walls of ice.
It was hard to figure out how to capture this massive wall in a photograph.
Since we were in a smaller boat, we could get very close to the glacier, unlike the larger cruise ships which had to turn around miles from the glaciers, due to the large pieces of ice in the water. Our smaller boat could maneuver around the icebergs whereas a larger ship can not. We saw this ship way in the distance, and as it turned around. I took this photo to show you how far it was from our vantage point.
In case you were wondering about the size of this particular glacier, you can get the perspective in this photo. If you look closely, you will see some of the large birds that were flying near the wall of ice. It was THAT big!
We were all taking photos from the front of the boat when we heard a loud cracking sound. Our captain told us that if we heard that, we would likely see a large piece break off from the wall. And seconds later, this tower (that had to be at least 40 feet high) calved into the water.
It made a huge splash and we watched as the birds make a mad dash to get out of the way.
Before we turned around and headed away from the glacier, I encouraged everyone to take a bunch of images to build a panorama later. I took 9 images with the
Canon R5 Mark II camera from left to right and stitched them together to make this panorama photo in Photoshop. The file size is almost half a gigabyte, and I can zoom into any area of this photo and see amazing detail, like the individual birds in flight.
Well folks, that completes the blog posts from this Alaska photo tour. I hope you enjoyed seeing all the photos. We had a blast taking them! People have been emailing me asking if I am going to do this one again. The boat that I used for this trip was sold right after we completed my tour, but I am looking at other options for the future. Stay tuned.
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