Another Photographic Failure
Guest Writer: Alan Schlesinger
Humpback Whale in Stephans Passage in Alaska Inside Passage
My wife and I recently returned from an eight-day cruise along Alaska’s Inside Passage. We had always wanted to visit this beautiful part of Southeast Alaska, and we had never been on a cruise before. We decided to splurge on this trip of a lifetime and signed up for a National Geographic/Lindblad small-ship cruise—100 passengers and a crew of 40 (including six naturalists), Zodiac excursions and sea kayaking, and vast landscapes and amazing wildlife.
As a photographer, deciding what camera gear to bring was daunting. Not experienced in wildlife photography, I opted not to bring the long telephoto lenses needed to capture close-up images of bears and whales—even though friends offered to lend me theirs. I have enough photographic experience to know that an eight-day adventure is not the time or place to begin learning those skills. Those skills must be honed over years of trial and error, with Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” invested before hoping to make amazing wildlife photographs on a trip like this.
Therefore, I chose to focus on landscape photography—a genre that, though not my main focus in photography, is one in which I do have some experience. So, foregoing the long telephoto lenses required for photographing wildlife, I instead packed wide-angle and short telephoto lenses well suited for landscape photography. I told my wife that instead of trying to make a beautiful close-up photograph of a whale or bear in the wild, my goal was to make a beautiful photograph of the vast Alaskan landscape featuring a whale or a bear.
When I captured this amazing sight of a humpback whale breaking the surface of the glass-like waters of Stephens Passage, the nearby silhouetted islands and mountains, and the last light of the setting sun kissing the peaks of the distant mountains, I was deeply satisfied. It was what I had hoped for—a beautiful photograph of an amazing landscape with a whale in it.
Why, then, the title “another photographic failure”? Because, though I had made an image that captured a breathtaking sight in the Inside Passage, the photograph failed to capture the entire experience of witnessing this magical portion of God’s creation: the sound of a hundred people gasping at the sight of a whale—whether it was their first time or they had seen many whales before—as it spouted a geyser of seawater skyward, flipped its tail, and took a deep dive, or the thunder of a glacier calving and sending a blue iceberg into the bay; the clean, woodsy smell of Sitka spruce when landing on the shore and stepping off a Zodiac, or the pungent aroma of hauled-out sea lions as one kayaks past nearby rocks; the tingle on exposed skin from the cool Alaskan summer air when standing on deck, or the chill of icy water dripping from your kayak paddle with every stroke.
Though I was very happy to have made what I consider a beautiful photograph—one I had “pre-visualized” and planned for—it did not fully capture what one experiences in this indescribably beautiful place. I have to agree with writer and photographer Dave Bohn, who, in 1966, first visited Glacier Bay in the Inside Passage and saw the terminus of Muir Glacier: “And now I understand. I understand all the old attempts at description. I understand why they were written and why they failed. The scene before me is staggering and I find no other word*.”
*Dave Bohn, Glacier Bay; The Land and the Silence. Ballantine Books, 1967. Page 133.
Alan Schlesinger
Joanna joannaseibert.com
