My trip to Seattle and Alaska in May on the Celebrity Solstice.
We went to Ketchikan, Tracy Arm Fjord, Inside Passage, Juneau, Skagway and Victoria. Afterwards we spent two (not enough) extra days in Seattle.
The weather was great, even in Ketchikan, the rainiest city. The cloud formations were incredible. The cruise was great.
We saw very little wildlife - a few porpoises, orcas, a bear, a few eagles. Being up so high in the ship made it hard to spot them. A different trip inland would be better for that.
I spent most of the time on the ship due to a bad knee, but it turns out you can see quite a bit, especially when the ship went up a narrow fjord to a glacier (Tracy Arm).
It's impossible to capture the scale in a single photo. I tried some panoramas, but I didn't like how the mountains looked so tiny and far away in them. So I used my zoom lens a lot to snag the tops of mountains and I love how it feels as if I'm mountaineering or in a helicopter. Through the magic of optics...
I took a lot of general travel style photos and have posted them here for my family. I wanted to give everyone who was along a nice variety of shots to choose from.
I love all the textures and patterns. It's a lot more monotone than I expected, but the land is so scarred from glaciers and earthquakes, and the top edges of the mountains make such cool shapes against the sky. Even the snow, undulating and blowing off the top, has character with the shadows and rocks.
I plan to revisit these photos over the next year, tweaking and reprocessing with some effects to achieve different looks.