“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll



An Interesting Day as a Photographer!


   So what in the world are cute kid photos doing in the same blog as a congressional debate? I can’t blame you if you think the selection of photos here doesn’t seem to go together but there is a connection.
 A couple of weeks ago, before the election, I was asked to photograph a small informal debate between Democratic congressional candidate Ethan Berkowitz and Republican  incumbent Don Young held at the BP Exploration building in Anchorage.   The interesting thing was I was already scheduled to shoot portraits for the preschool my daughter attends that same morning. Luckily the timing worked out and I was able to do both jobs.
   I can’t tell you what an odd feeling it was to shoot a high profile debate between serious political figures and then leave and within fifteen minutes be shooting three and four year old preschool kids. It was sort of surreal.
   I bring this up because it emphasizes what an interesting career photography has turned out to be. I never know what might come up but it’s a privilege to be able to document and be a part of so many different aspects of our world. It’s hard to imagine that I used to go sit at the same desk, day in and day out, for years! Slay me!
   Technically, shooting the debate was somewhat challenging in that the indoor fluorescent lighting is always horrendous as far as color balance. This is when shooting RAW has a tremendous advantage. In the RAW image converter I was able to tweak one image until the color balance looked good and then I applied the same adjustment to all the images. Also, it’s fairly dark so I was shooting at ISO 1600 and 3200 to keep the shutter speed fast enough for me to avoid blur. Flash would have been too distracting in a situation like this.
   The kid portraits were taken with a soft box on my left and a spot light on the background behind the child. I also had a reflector on the right to bounce some fill into that side. A simple set up that has great results.
 I can’t wait to see what the future holds!