“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll






Anticipating the Iditarod


   Tomorrow morning is the ceremonial start of the 2008 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, also known as “The Last Great Race On Earth”, or simply The Iditarod. It is truly an amazing event and if you have any interest at all I strongly urge you to follow it through the official Iditarod web site, and the Anchorage Daily News. They give constant updates complete with photos and videos.
   So far, I’m not one of the lucky few who get to photograph the race in its entirety-see Jeff Schultz’s work- but I still get a thrill out of photographing the ceremonial start on Saturday in Anchorage, and then the re-start in Willow on Sunday.
 The first day is interesting because there has been a snow trail laid down throughout the city of Anchorage to allow for the running of sled dog teams. This includes roadways, overpasses and city parks, so there are numerous spots you can park and get to the trail and cheer on the musher’s as they go by. As stated, the first day is ceremonial and most musher’s even have an extra person on board, someone who had the highest bid to be able to ride this leg of the race, but it’s special to see. Often you’ll see racers high-fiveing fans on the sideline as they go by. And it’s wonderful to hear the panting of the dogs and the padding of their feet in the snow as they go by at a leisurely trot. Last year my son was able to gather a bootie that had fallen off one of the dogs. A treasure indeed!
   For the restart in Willow on Sunday, I like to hike down the trail as far as I can so I can get some shots of the teams in a setting that more closely resembles them being out in the great Alaskan wilderness. There, I want photos with no crowds or buildings in the background. And, as you can tell from the images here, I really like to zoom in on the dogs and get action “portraits” of them at work. Their expressions are endless, ranging from intense to casual to comical. They are the athletes of this event and I never cease to marvel at their well-trained, fine tuned, muscular physiques.
   So, in anticipation of this weekend, I’ve put up images from last year. As you can see the weather was beautiful (though very cold!) and exposure wasn’t a problem. For the most part I shot in aperture priority mode. This way I can set my aperture to it’s widest opening, F2.8 or F4, and then my camera will automatically adjust the shutter speed. It was so bright that having a fast shutter speed at ISO 100 was no problem. For any overall scenes with a lot of white snow I added one and a half stops to my exposure to keep the white areas white. Most cameras are capable of doing this even in a program mode-check your manual. For details and close-ups I just left the exposure alone.
   I used my predictive auto-focus mode most of the time so I could easily keep my moving subjects in focus and occasionally I would pre-focus on a spot and shoot a burst of images without moving the camera. This would allow me to set my composition-background etc. and wait for the action to come into the frame.
   This weekend I want to try some new things. I’ll show you the results next week!