Alaska . . .

By John Terence Turner
Stock Asylum Columnist
March 13, 2008

© 2006 John Terence Turner


Alaska. Land of the midnight sun. The 49th State. My destination.

The shoot required a three-week trip that covered virtually all of Alaska. The assignment was for a large travel company through their agency in Seattle.

The final result was to be an eighty page magazine-size brochure that covered everything the company offered in Alaska. The basic layout was a series of page and a half horizontal photographs, supported by numerous smaller ones. Copy detailed what was offered on each of the trips and the cost of each level of luxury available.

My pictures were 90 percent of what was used. The volume of film shot was considerable and resulted in a decent stock file.

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Weather was a major factor for John Terence Turner's shoot in Alaska. The 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, for example, is shrouded in clouds about two-thirds of the time, even in summer. ( © John Terence Turner ).

The crew was an art director who occasionally doubled as assistant, a junior executive from the client whose job it was to re-arrange our constantly changing accommodations and transportation requirements as needed –– and me.

The schedule changed constantly because the client required we avoid cloudy skies. Though the shoot took place in the summer, Alaska, has more than its share of cloudy skies year around.

It is, after all, far to the north, bordered by the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, which are sources of much nasty weather — even in the summer.

This curious fox proved to be a willing model. ( © John Terence Turner ).

Accordingly, I hired a firm in Houston that tracks weather for the petroleum industry. It is a very high-tech outfit that uses worldwide satellite imagery to forecast weather all over the globe.

They set up a contract for our photographic tour of Alaska. I gave them our list of locations where the client wanted us to shoot.

We called them a day or so before I finished shooting at any place and they would tell us where, from our location list, I would find sunshine. Most of the time they were right.

At that point, our personal travel agent from the client would busy herself on the phone and arrange transportation and rooms at some presumably sunny spot.

She carried with her a travel industry book of vouchers that enabled her to pay whatever anything cost. The art director and I imagined stealing the book of golden vouchers from her and setting off on a fantasy trip around the world.

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Late afternoon sun in Ketchikan helped make this a special image. The client later made it into an award-winning poster. ( © John Terence Turner ).

We didn’t need to travel the world; we had all we could handle in Alaska. We traveled by commercial jet, by bush seaplane, by helicopter, by ocean liner, by chartered boat, by rental car and by foot.

We covered all of Alaska, from Ketchikan in the Southeast to Kotzebue, north of the Arctic Circle.

No summer trip to Alaska is complete without mosquitoes. They are big, numerous and aggressive.

I read that the early Russian explorers of the Yukon River had to put their heads in burlap sacks at night to sleep.

This sourdough offered Turner a chance to shoot a wonderful personality study. ( © John Terence Turner ).

Once you experience the dense clouds of insect dive bombers, the burlap solution becomes attractive.

Near Kotzebue, I spied a herd of reindeer and went out on the tundra to photograph it.

The day was sunny, I wore a tennis shirt under a heavy sweater. My Domke bag was slung over my shoulder. I got the pictures and I got bit.

Back at my room, I discovered that the mosquitoes had bitten through the sweater and the shirt next to where the wide strap of the bag had pressed it down against my skin.

They also had penetrated my hair, leaving numerous itchy welts in my scalp. I should have passed out from the blood loss.

The art director and I sent a very large, smashed mosquito back to the agency, scotch-taped to a post card. “Wish you were here.” It said.

The travel system worked pretty well in the beginning, because the weather forecasters in Houston had the whole list to choose from. As we worked our way through the list, the choices narrowed and it became more difficult to find sunny locations.

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Since highway's are limited, small planes like this float plane are a part of Alaskan culture. Trevelling between shoots, Turner took the opportunity to shoot the plane against a blue mountain lake. ( © John Terence Turner ).

The system worked brilliantly in Denali Park, however.

The crown jewel of Alaska is Mount McKinley. Little did we know (but a Park Ranger told us) that even in the summer, 20,320-foot McKinley is visible only one third of the time.

We arrived, got, the necessary permit to drive into the park and set out on a brilliant summer day.

We drove the 90 miles to Mirror Lake and halfway there, encountered two busloads of tourists admiring the cloud-free McKinley.

We also saw moose, grizzlies, mountain goats and a very curious red fox (shot hastily with a 300mm lens hand-held).

The road that leads to Mirror Lake is dirt, narrower than two lanes and lightly traveled because only permitted vehicles are allowed.

With about 30 miles to get out of the park after a long day of shooting, we got a flat tire — and discovered that our rental car had no spare! From where we were, about 10 miles of road was visible behind us and there wasn’t a car on it.

It was 8 p.m. and the prospect of a night shivering in a little Toyota was becoming likely. Suddenly, at the farthest distance we could see on the road down in the valley, there appeared the cloud of dust from a car heading our way.

The wait was interminable.

The art director and I, gave the driver no choice but to stop. We positioned ourselves on the road in such a way that our tragic back country deaths would have been the only alternative to stopping the car.

Just as the Spanish Republicans had vowed “¡No Pasarán!” to Franco’s fascists in their civil war, we were determined to prevent anyone from passing us (I guess it is worth noting that the Spanish Republicans lost).

Fortunately, the driver was a kind Park Ranger heading out of Denali after a long day on duty.

Miraculously, his spare fit our car. He followed us back to town where we vented our wrath on some innocent lad at the Avis counter. It was very unsatisfying because he was a high school kid who had no responsibility for the missing spare.

“I’m really sorry, man.” He said sincerely. Yeah.

Our next stop was Southeastern Alaska and Ketchikan with its wealth of totem poles.

As always, the challenge was to do it a little differently.

I like the picture with late afternoon sun hitting the front of the totem; I shot a profile of one of the faces on the totem and let the forest in the background disappear into black.

The agency did a very handsome poster of this shot and it won a design award.

On the Ketchikan leg we flew into the backcountry for some additional scenic images.

Bush planes in Alaska are like second cars to many people. While on our brief flight, I got this picture of a float-plane nicely framed by a little mountain lake.

Ever chasing the weather, we went next into Canada and the Yukon. In Dawson, we saw the remnants of the mining culture where we
met a charming old sourdough who had seen more history and spat more tobacco than any of us could imagine.

Once back in Alaska, I had an impulse to look over my shoulder as we were driving through a pass near Fairbanks and saw the sun setting on the Trans Alaska Pipeline.

We stopped and I put the 600mm Nikkor onto the tripod and shot a picture of the conjunction of industry and semi-wilderness. It hadn’t seemed like much of a picture as we passed it, but when I looked down on it (and compressed it with the long lens), it became a picture worth shooting.

One item on the client’s list that gave us the most problems was the Columbia Glacier, at the end of a fjord off Prince William Sound. It was an important side trip because tourists could go from Valdez on a 50-passenger charter boat to the dramatic vertical edge of the glacier, have drinks chilled with glacier ice and watch the glacier calve.

Calving is when great chunks of ice break loose from the mass of the glacier and plummet into the sea, literally 50 yards from the charter boat, causing waves to gently toss the charter boat and the surrounding icebergs enough to titillate the well-lubricated tourists into appreciating the power of nature.

The first time we went there (round trip was most of a day), it rained. The second time, the rain descended from clouds so dark they seemed to be announcing the Apocalypse.

At the end of the shoot, the client insisted that we try again. The side trip was too lucrative to leave out of the brochure.

Houston said, “Southeast Alaska will be pretty cloudy and rainy, but just about the only place you might find decent weather will be at the Columbia Glacier.”

It was worth a try, so the art director and I left Anchorage at 4:30 a.m., flew commercial to Valdez and boarded the now too-familiar charter boat which the client had rented just for the two of us. We headed north for the Columbia Glacier.

We were dead-tired after three weeks of very long days so we slept on sofas in the main salon. After a couple of hours of motoring through Prince William Sound, I awoke and was disappointed to see gray skies and rain.

Our captain was cautiously optimistic. “The fjord is far enough in that you might get a little different weather,” he said.

He was right, once we turned into the dramatic fjord and rounded a bend that allowed us a view of the end of it where we could see the Columbia Glacier, we could see sunshine reflecting off the ice. It was the only sun for miles!

Turner dances on an iceberg near the conclusion of the Alaska shoot. ( © John Terence Turner ).

We arrived and our captain put his craft closer than he had ever been to the face of the glacier. I shot a lot and was so happy to have finally had good weather at the Glacier I couldn’t resist hopping onto a conveniently close iceberg for an impromptu tap dance on the ice.

The captain was dubious, saying that sometimes just a little extra weight on an iceberg would cause it to roll over. I handed the camera to the art director and said, “shoot fast, I’ll be quick.”

Since I offer no competition to Fred Astaire (as my wife will attest), my time on the iceberg was mere seconds.

We were finished at last. But then the agency called and asked if I would shoot three more days on the passenger ship from Haines to Vancouver, B.C.

To sweeten the deal, they would fly my wife Lynda and my 3-year-old son Michael, up to join me on the trip. I agreed.

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The client extended the shoot, but agreed to fly the photographer's wife and three-year-old to Alaska for the final days on a passenger ship. Here Michael looks for phantom whales. ( © John Terence Turner ).

The last shot is Michael on the bridge with the Captain. The Captain told him he would be able to see whales if he looked through the binoculars.

Michael believed the Captain because, after all, he was The Captain. He searched the sea with the binoculars. There were no whales, no matter where he looked. A few months after we got home, he decided he didn’t believe in Santa Claus, either.

(John Terence Turner has been shooting stock photography for 20 years. His work can be seen at Getty Images, Alamy and, of course, The Stock Asylum, where his column appears twice a month. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.)

 

Turner's web site can be found at: http://www.johnterenceturner.com.

For more of his images: click here.

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