Alaska animal sightings..

On our recent trip to Alaska we saw many animals on the Denali Bus tour, on our way to and from Denali, at the wildlife conservatory in Turnagain Arm.. 

You could watch animals cross the desolate roads.. closest we saw this was at Yellowstone. The area of the preserve has to be really huge for this to happen is our guess!

Here are some of the pictures .. 

That was Dall sheep on the steep cliff faces, elk, grizzlies, moose, musk oxen, an owl, Ptarmigan which happens to be the state bird in Alaska, wood bison which is endangered and caribou! 

We are definitely going to plan another Alaska visit for a longer time in a couple of years.. Apparenlty you need to have 20 photographs published to be able to apply for a permit to go inside the park to photograph wild life and it is a lottery system of sorts. Will get there in time!

Options Galore!

Another attempt at salvaging a picture..

The original which was over exposed (my mistake for not changing settings after switching lenses)

My first attempt to cover it up by using artistic filters and adjusting the shadows and highlights..

The "Sankara Sastry" in me refusing to accept the "artistic" fix and doing a proper job of layering the image and blending it. .

At this point the image gets incremental improvement for every 10 minutes spent n the picture.

This goes to show the importance of many things..

a. make sure you check your settings everytime you switch lenses from Telephoto to wide angle so that you don't have to photoshop in the first place. 

b. always shoot raw images so you can pull this off in post processing

c. If you have overexposed sky and you cannot take bracketed shots (too much movement like this boat, wave etc. ) create smart object copies and blend images! 

This was worth the effort.. when printing the larger version of this image on an 8x10 it came out pretty good!

Flying by Denali

We are an equal opportunity family, at least when blog photos are concerned.

The last post saw the little one all happy to be airborne. This one has Jr. aka style missy on the plane.

We spent a wonderful two days at the Grande Denali Lodge which was an architectural marvel in itself. It is on a hill and the windy gravel road that leads up to it is apparently the third highest road in Alaska (or close to it)!

The views from the hotel were spectacular and the service was great. The kids loved the place. There were pick up services for the air taxi and to other places there from the hotel door which was great! 

If the views from the lobby and rooms were great, the views on the Fly Denali plane were mind blowing!

Here are the last few shots taken as we flew back from seeing Denali mountain up close towards Haley.

If you are going with small kids on this 8 seater plane.. remember this! There is NO restroom on an 8 seater plane. You get a bucket. The sight of the bucket is enough to deter any kid from thinking about going.. The bucket officially beats "think of daisies" as the pee pee restrainer!

That one looks hazy but the large size image shows up much better than this compressed jpg on this website.. 

On our way back the sun did his magic by giving us some special effects. We were going through clouds and that helped!

Have not gotten around to editing the images from the ground trip through the National park by bus.. 

On this trip we travelled by plane, boat, bus, car... bike, horse and dog-sled were other options, but the Homestead tour where we get to see the sled dogs being trained was vetoed against the better wishes of Jr. and the little one.. we know how it goes. . . first it is a request to see huskie puppies and before you know it the puppy lobby in the house has a major advantage and we are back to discussing why we will not have dogs in the house!

Next, bus tour pictures..