TRAIN TO WHITTIER, ALASKA

On our Alaska tour/cruise we were transported by train from Talkeetna to Whittier, where we were to board our ship.  The seven hour rail trip was scenic but very long and made longer by a very annoying "guide" who told numerous stories in a self-important, cloying manner and who kept pestering us to buy some sort of book concerning the ride.  We turned her down at least three times.

Photography on the trip was challenging for a couple of reasons.  First, much of the time the train was moving pretty fast--60 miles an hour--and that made it difficult to incorporate any foreground elements because of motion blur.  If I had attempted to pan the camera to compensate for the movement, that would have caused the background to show motion blur.  As a result, I had to avoid including anything in the near foreground and just accept the fact that the photos were going to lack crispness.  A second factor that reduced the quality of the images was that I had to shoot everything through the glass of the train windows.  To add to that problem, I noticed that there was some sort of interaction between my camera's polarizing filter and the train's window glass that was creating a rainbow effect in some of the shots.  Even so, I managed to get a few shots that worked OK, despite the overcast and occasional rain.

Some of the shots seemed to work better as black & whites.

This shot below was my favorite, primarily for the meandering stream running through the tidal mudflats in the foreground.

The last shot I got on this leg of our trip was of our cruise ship, the Crown Princess, docked at Whittier.

John