Coastal photography from the Pacific Northwest and beyond
On our Alaska voyage, Queen Elizabeth could not travel all the way into Disenchantment Bay, (icebergs & oceanliners, anyone?) so we transferred to two smaller excursion boats to get closer to the glaciers. One of the boats can be seen here, , giving a sense of the scale of Turner Glacier behind it. Turner is roughly half the height of Hubbard Glacier just to the east, which makes the comparison even more striking.
It’s difficult to hard to render the scale of Hubbard Glacier, even in a wide photograph – it’s nearly as tall as a 40-story building. The fractured wall of blue ice dominates the foreground, yet beyond it rise snowfields, mountains, and glaciers stretching toward the horizon. And it thunders as it continues, inexorably, to Disenchantment Bay.
Flying above Misty Fjords National Monument near Ketchikan, breaks in the late-summer cloud bank revealed dark lakes and forested ridges thousands of feet below. The shifting weather opened and closed the landscape by the minute, offering a fleeting glimpse into one of North America's most dramatic coastal wildernesses before the mist reclaimed it. It’s also vast and silent – about the size of Connecticut – with no buildings or development.
Aerial photography allows you to “rehearse” a route once and then use autopilot to repeat the circle. Of all the angles, I love seeing the 1905 Coupeville Town Wharf in front of the town it symbolizes. And for my friends back in New England, this is Whidbey Island, Washington, not Maine.
I used aerial cameras for this, flying in from several miles away over Deception Pass at the North tip of Whidbey Island, Washington. I was thrilled to turn the camera down and capture the 1935 bridge that floats almost two hundred feet above a silvery spring afternoon.
Shot on an extremely dark late October morning near the mouth of the Samish River, near Edison, Washington, I was drawn to the long-abandoned wreck of a wooden boat, its owners and journeys lost to time.
Lime Kiln Lighthouse is poised on the western shore of San Juan Island on the Salish Sea, looking toward Victoria, BC and the Olympic Mountains across the water. I took many photos and selected this one for its symmetry (which required my balancing on a rock edge.)
We spent a day touring the south coast of Iceland. Vik is famous for its church, its black sand beaches and its puffins. But this woman reading alone on the basalt columns at the beach was a striking contrast that needed no color adjustments at all.
We have a family tradition to stay for a long weekend in Coupeville, Washington on Penn Cove each October. Coupeville Wharf is an icon, and the sky was especially moody on this blustery early morning.
The largest beach on Long Island Sound in Southold, New York on the North Fork. I lifeguarded at many beaches, including this one, when I was growing up.
Summer’s end. This was shot through my windshield during a fierce Atlantic downpour on the ferry dock at Orient Point, New York heading back to Massachusetts on Labor Day.
I was fortunate to discover Ebey’s Landing on Whidbey Island on my first trip there, and it remains a beautiful place to observe the Salish Sea, from the beach or the bluffs. This was a magnificent autumn day – windy and warmer than it looks.