Moose on an Arctic evening

Click here to view at 1000 pixels wide.

This is a photo that was easy to get ... and very difficult to make "good" in the computer. It was taken with an Olympus optical SLR, about 1999, and little did I know at the time, the camera had a light meter problem: it wasn't reading properly. It took quite some time for me to diagnose the problem -- the first thing you do is blame yourself for botching up the shot. (Not guilty!) This one could be salvaged in the computer. It was easy to capture: I stood on the roadside with about 50 other people, all of whom had noticed a pair of moose grazing the swamplands just off the landward side of the Seward Highway, which hugs one side of Turnagain Arm, heading out of Anchorage, Alaska. The lighting conditions were low: overcast, with the sun down behind the Chugach and the Alaskan twilight getting ready to last through till dawn. Ten years later, the flat, rather murky print was scanned at 600dpi, then resized to 1000 pixels wide to display properly on average monitors ... and then the fun began. You're juggling contrast, gamma, color saturation, and the hues themselves. All these parameters were adjusted many times to achieve the result you see here. Photo by Mel, 1999.