Photography and Trip Documentation Tips

I'm no professional photographer, but I have spent years documenting the Yukon, so here are a few of my tips to make sure you have the best photographs to document your trip!

The Yukon is BIG.

Like... really big! And unless you are super dialed in on wide angle, landscape shots, you'll usually want something with a bit more zoom power while you visit. Our valleys are massive here and it can be tough to execute a really great wide angle shot. Of course, give it a try if you want! But for me, I find they never look as good as a more zoomed in one! My usual day-to-day lens is the 70-200mm f/2.8 as it find it offers a great amount of zoom while still being able to capture the sheer size of the northern landscapes!

Also, if you zoom in, it will bring the background closer to you and make it look bigger! So next time you're getting your photo taken in front of a mountain with your phone, have the photographer do 3x zoom and stand back farther. The mountain will look way bigger and closer to you!

You might see the Northern Lights!

Honestly, cellphones are so great at night photography now, I would recommend using your phone to take Northern Lights photos! This saves you from having to bring a tripod, and it will keep you from completely freezing outside!

Wildlife encounters can happen (and you need to keep your distance).

Again, a camera or phone with a good zoom can be super helpful during wildlife encounters! As always, you want to keep your distance for both your and the animals' safety, so a camera with a good zoom can be great for this! I will often use my 70-200mm f/2.8 for wildlife as well as it's usually what's on my camera when we are driving (which is usually when you see animals in the Yukon), but newer cellphones also have really great zoom capabilities!

A few editing tips!

Everyone has different preferences on editing their photos, so I am going to leave this one pretty vague! I use a few presets that I made on Lightroom to edit the majority of my photos, but sometimes I also just use the editing feature directly in the iPhone photo app! My go-to is to up the vibrance, raise the blacks, lower the whites, and reduce the texture and clarity to give it a more "dreamy" look!

Physical photos are a lost art; let's bring them back!

I have been slowly trying to fill up some photo albums again with my favourite pictures! Can we bring this back? I miss being able to flip through photo books and see all the printed-out pictures! Of course, Social Media is fun to post on, but there's something so special about having a physical copy of something and not having to scroll through thousands of images and wait for things to download from the cloud in order to look at them!