Category : Alaska

Alaska is the one place in this guide where the light itself is different, and the reason is geometry rather than weather. At sixty-one degrees north the midsummer noon sun reaches only about fifty degrees above the horizon; at sixty-four it reaches forty-nine; in the equinoxes it is under thirty and in midwinter it is barely five. The hard overhead sun that flattens faces and blacks out eye sockets at noon in the lower forty-eight simply does not occur here.

The light rakes rather than falls, all day, for most of the year — which means there is no midday to avoid, the position matters more than the clock, and a small window lights a whole room because the light enters almost horizontally. It also means the warm hour is not an hour: in June the low light lasts two or three hours and the usable light runs until near midnight, so a portrait session at ten in the evening is better lit than one at two in the afternoon.

Two other things run through the guides below. The calendar starts weeks earlier than anywhere else: the tundra turns red in late August, birch goes gold before September, the first snow appears on the peaks — locally called termination dust — and by early September the nights are dark enough for aurora while the days are still long enough to work in. That fortnight, roughly the last week of August through mid-September, is the answer for almost every venue here.

And the second is honesty about the constraints, because they are real: rain is the default on the southeast coast, Denali is hidden most days, boat and air access can be stopped by weather, mudflats and glacial rivers are genuinely dangerous ground, mosquitoes in June are serious rather than annoying, and a January ceremony in the interior is a matter of minutes rather than an hour. Each guide names the shade, the hour, the exposure decision and the covered alternative, and says plainly what the odds are. We have not photographed at every venue here, and where we have not, we say so.