Entry tags:

alaska, denali, panos, travel

Denali Panos
Nature is the best cure for human haughtiness. Every time I step outside into the real wilderness of Alaska I am reminded of my insignificance, which means I should do that more often. If it was a prescription, once a day would be the right amount, just to reset the arrogance clock back to 00:00.

One of the best places to humble yourself infront of the magnificence of nature is Denali National Park - 24,585 sq.kms of pure unspoilt back country. Home to bears, caribou, moose and North America's tallest Peak - Denali or Mt.McKinley, it begs for the widest of wide angle lenses. Otherwise you'll have to bring your 'other' lenses, the ones behind your pupils.

How can I convey to others the wide screen splendor of Denali without a wide angle lens? The answer is, cultivate good friends, the kind who'll let you borrow their tripod on a weekend for no charge. And voila, your lowly kit lens could be used to shoot panoramas that might motivate people to visit Alaska, bolster the State's economy, thereby single-handedly administer CPR to the ailing airline industry, make Chinese banks restart lending to Americans,...haa I believe in the power of dreams(dollar is sinking anyway) and panos.

(Please click on the pictures to see the real images which again have been reduced 30% from the original.)

The pics above and below this paragraph were taken from Grand Denali Lodge where we stayed overnight. We had a wonderful view from our room similar to the one below, thanks to an end of season Alaskan Resident deal. What you see in these pictures is the main lodging/dining hub in the national park area, with Parks Highway winding north and Nenana river and the low mountains of the Alaska Range in the background.





This is at Polychrome pass inside Denali National Park at Mile 45. Only the first 15 miles of road inside the Park is accessible to private vehicles. There are shuttle buses and tour buses(not the big AC juggernauts, but revamped school buses) that take tourists in to the Park. p.s- Never shoot at the sun or your photo will end up looking like this.


On the Parks highway, traveling south from Denali to Cantwell, a wonderful stretch of red, an area favored by migratory swans. There is one in the pic, an almost invisible white dot on water.


Toklat River, a braided glacial river at Mile 53. There is another picture of Toklat river I took in 2005 (last one in this page), shows how the river changes its course every now and then. It flows much closer to the banks these days.


This one is from the Denali Highway, the subject of my last post. Hunters, moose and mosquitoes abound in these parts.


This post is sponsored by Photoshop CS3. As far as stitching panoramas goes, CS3 shows a world of improvement over CS2. I was fighting a losing battle with CS2 till I realized that I could get a trial version of CS3(now maybe even CS4), which turned out to be so intelligent that with a little modification it might do laparoscopic surgery by itself.