In Southwest Alaska Video
I had another fun season up in Alaska this year, counting salmon, hiking streams and of course taking pictures and video clips everywhere in between. I shot a decent amount of footage this year, but while going through it back at home I realized I hadn't shot as much as I had in previous years, apparently deciding to focus a little more towards photography during the season. I still have a bunch of footage that I would like to put into some sort of brief documentary about the research the program conducts, we'll see.
The video starts off with landscape shots from our research station on Porcupine Island on Iliamna Lake. We were lucky to have a good handful of clear nights toward the end of the season, when it actually gets dark at night, allowing me to get some shots of some spectacular Northern Lights displays. Although many of the night shots were set up just inside of camp it was fun to also take a boat out on a couple nights to get some neat shots over the lake from a bluff just on the north end of the island. I think that the most spectacular display we had all season was while we were conducting our annual townet surveys at night. Of course the camera was sitting at camp, but it was amazing to be out on the lake with the sky bursting with soothing patterns of greens and reds all around.
Shots from the quadcopter really dominated the video. It was a lot of fun piloting that thing around until some technical issues and maybe just a little bit of pilot error caused it to crash into the woods never to be found again. It was only a little disappointing losing something that I had worked on for a long while, but I found that it was more disappointing that I wasn't able to get any footage of salmon in the creeks which I had been looking forward to for over half a year. In fact the day I lost it was the first day I was shooting salmon in streams. I was still able to get some shots from Lake Aleknagik, specifically from the Agulowak River which connects Lake Nerka and the following chain of lakes of the Wood River system to Aleknagik, and I had several opportunities to fly at Bear Creek as well. Over at Iliamna we used the quadcopter for our stream surveying project, allowing us to sort of map out the directions we needed to go. We also used it to see if we could conduct salmon counts at Pedro Bay Ponds as well so I had some footage collected from those projects.
Salmon shots were taken at Knutson Creek, Chinkelyes Creek and Fuel Dump Island at Iliamna. Salmon were in the Lake in incredible numbers this year! It was awesome to see the mouth of Knutson Creek just jam packed with fish. Except for Fuel Dump Island, none of the locations we go to to collect data are immediately close to camp so we tend to only go to most places once, a few times if we are lucky. In order to maximize my productivity at Knutson Creek I employed my friend Hannah to man the GoPro here while I tried to take pictures, so she gets credit for some of the shots from there. The other two places, Chinkelyes Creek a tributary of the Iliamna River and Fuel Dump Island I gave shooting RAW footage with my DSLR a shot. If you are wondering what that is, just imagine a DSLR taking 24 RAW pictures (pictures with a ton of editable data) per second rather than just 24 video frames. I think my 64 gb card fills up with something like 5-10 minutes of video. The workflow back at home is incredibly tedious but I thought it was well worth the effort.
If anything was missing from this year it was bears. I heard a couple of theories as to why I hadn't seen a single one in-person all season. One is that the mild winter on them was really hard on them, the other was that salmon were so plentiful in the streams that bears didn't have to come down to where there was the possibility of human interaction.
Anyway, all in all another great summer and another video in the books. Let the planning for the next season begin!
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