Alaska Cruise Photography Tips

Alaska presents three specific photographic problems: very bright ice that fools meters, fast moving animals at distance from an unstable platform, and persistent low light in fjords. Solve those three and everything else follows.

Alaska is a difficult place to photograph well and an easy place to photograph badly. The difficulties are specific and solvable.

Problem one: ice fools your meter

A camera meter assumes the average scene is mid grey. Fill the frame with a glacier and the meter tries to render that white ice as grey, underexposing by roughly a stop.

Fix: dial in +0.5 to +1.0 exposure compensation whenever ice dominates the frame. Check the histogram rather than the screen, which is unreliable in bright conditions.

A related point: dense glacial ice reads blue because compression has forced the air out, so it absorbs longer wavelengths. The bluest ice is the freshest and deepest, and it reads bluer under overcast skies than in bright sun. Do not try to correct that blue in post processing. It is what you came for.

Problem two: moving animals from a moving platform

Both you and the subject are moving, and image stabilisation cannot fix subject motion.

Settings for whales and wildlife from a boat:

• Shutter 1/1600 second or faster
• Continuous autofocus, with a wide or zone area rather than a single point
• Burst mode
• Auto ISO with a ceiling around 3200
• No polariser. It costs a stop and a half exactly when you need speed

The classic humpback shot is the fluke as the whale sounds, and you get about two seconds. Watch for the arched back. That is the cue, and if you wait for the tail you have missed it.

Problem three: low light in fjords

Fjord walls block direct sun for much of a transit, and Alaska overcast is genuinely dark. Many of the best moments happen at 5:30 am in a north facing fjord.

Fix: be willing to push ISO to 1600 or 3200. Modern sensors handle it and a sharp noisy image beats a clean blurred one. Brace against a deck rail, which buys two or three stops of stability.

Gear that earns its place

Phone cameras handle landscapes well and wildlife badly. If you are bringing one camera and wildlife matters, bring the long lens.

Subjects and how to approach them

Glaciers

Include something for scale: a tour boat, kayakers, birds, the ship's rail. A glacier photographed alone flattens into an abstract white shape and communicates nothing about size.

Video the calving and photograph the aftermath. Calving is too fast and unpredictable for stills; the picture worth taking is the wave and churned ice immediately after.

Whales

Covered above. One addition: shoot wider than feels right. A tightly cropped fluke with no context is less interesting than a fluke with a mountain range behind it.

Totem poles and rainforest

Overcast is an advantage. Direct sun through a canopy creates blown highlights and heavy shadow that destroy carved detail. Totem Bight in flat light is far better than in sun.

Towns

Early. Get ashore at 7:30 am before the crowds and Skagway or Ketchikan photograph cleanly with long shadows and empty streets. By 10:00 am there are four thousand people in the frame.

The ship

Aft decks at sailaway, and the wake at night. Both are underused and both work.

Timing

In June there is no real golden hour, there is a golden three hours, roughly 8:00 to 11:00 pm and again from 4:00 am. Use it. The best light of an Alaska cruise happens when most passengers are at dinner or asleep.

In September the light is shorter but the air is clearer, which is why many photographers prefer the late season. See best month for an Alaska cruise.