I met up with Courtney and Pete in Almonte, and we played around in the rocky water­falls near the old mill.

…Mike

Jang and Mick were married on a day that was supposed to be all thundery and rainy, but they totally lucked out and caught a break in the weather!

…Mike

I scooted off to Alaska last week to hang out with my friend Melissa and her family (she is also a photog­rapher). It’s always fun to watch another photog­rapher working in their own back yard, and we did some shooting, and some touristing, and I generally had a great time. Mike (Melissa’s better half) was smoking the salmon he had caught a few days earlier. I wanted to do some fishing too, but once I compared the fantasy of fishing for salmon in Alaska with the reality, I wasn’t so sure:

The locals call this “combat fishing.” These are all tourists. Doesn’t look like much fun. Mike said that when the main fishing season is open, it is literally shoulder-to-shoulder with tourists. When the locals go fishing, they go to their secret spot. No, I don’t know where that is. But I do know that the filets that their neighbor who so kindly gave me were 18 inches long.

While we were driving to an fro I managed to get a few neat-o photos, despite the fact that the sun was visible for about 5 seconds in the entire week I was there. And the sun never even really sets this time of year, so I was double bitter. But I digress.

First off, water­falls. If you spend any time at all looking through my blog, you’ll know that if there is a waterfall around, I’ll sniff it out. This one was easier than most to sniff, due to the huge sign on the side of the road that said “Thunderbird Falls” and the nicely groomed trail leading right to it. The way I tell it though, it was a battle.

See those friendly-looking maple-tree-like things on the lower right side? They are not friendly. They are thorny and if you get stung by one, it gets all red and rashy. The maple tree bush things in Alaska are tough.

We messed around in the moun­tains at bit too, at a spot called Hatcher Pass. In this one, you can see the little hillocks formed as the soil grad­ually slides down the side of the mountain (for scale, each one is about two feet across):

The geog­raphy major in me was fasci­nated by the U-shaped valley and cirques common of glacier erosion. The place is thick with glaciers BTW.

See that road? A few days later we drove from Talkeetna back to Wasilla along that road, during which we scared a moose:

Speaking of: Talkeetna!

This is the furthest north I have ever been BTW.

Most of the drive looked like a typical northern tundra scene:

The fireweed broke up all the greens:

It was a great trip! Thanks Mike for the hospi­tality and the salmon jerky! Thanks Ben and Bek for the full-contact Age of Empires matches! And thanks Melissa for shut­tling me around for a week

…Mike

While I was up visiting my pal Melissa in Alaska, she invited me to come along to shoot with her. Being the guy that I am, of course I said yes ? Seriously: how could I refuse the oppor­tunity to photo­graph a wedding with Alaska’s premiere photog­rapher (and a great friend) at a scenic resort in Alaska?

See that building way at the top there?? Once the ceremony was over, that’s where we went

And then we came back down again. Fun!

While on the way down in the tram, I took a bit of time to be a tourist and got a few images of the glaciers.

I already can’t wait to get back

…Mike

You may have noticed that I haven’t done too many weddings this spring…well, there’s a reason for that ? I decided to take the spring off to do some things around the house, specif­i­cally build a new 16×16 deck to replace our old rickety 7×13 one. The Inlaws were in town for a week to help out and we got the main part of the deck done despite the ridiculous amount of rain we have had.

During the building, I set up a camera to take a photo every 30 seconds, and then strung them all together into a stop-motion video that you can see below. I still have to finish the handrails, benches and planters (I’ll show that stuff in a second video) but for now, enjoy!