Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

It’s the beginning of a new year so photographers everywhere are pulling together their ‘best of’ lists and the Anchorage Daily News is no exception. In addition to galleries from the six remaining staff shooters, assistant photo editor Anne Raup built an audio-less slide show of her favorite images. Link to our YIP is here.

It’s been a crazy year for us: we lost two photographers to lay offs (Evan Steinhauser in June and Jim Lavrakas took a voluntary laid off in October) and yet the paper’s web site, adn.com, vaulted to #48 in the 2008 Alexa rankings (thanks in large part to Palin mania).

Changes continue next week as the paper goes to two sections Monday - Thursday, and, unfortunately, the first part of 2009 looks every bit as grim as the end of 2008.

I spent Tuesday night at Election Central in Anchorage and while the main party upstairs was pretty slow, the Obama rally downstairs was off the charts. The room was packed and it felt … historic.

(video and audio collected with the Canon G9)

Our mountains are better than your mountains.

All Saints Epsicopal Church, Anchorage

The new Anchorage convention center opened earlier this month and completely changed the nature of the surrounding streets.

But across F Street, at the foot of the 20-story tall Robert B. Atwood Building (home to the State of Alaska’s Anchorage offices), is All Saints Episcopal Church. No moose but I think there’s a lot of Alaska in this picture. (Canon G9, October 24, 2008)

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out, but activating the G9 mute function to silence the enormously irritating ‘operation sound’ also silences the playback of audio files.

So to enable audio playback without enabling the operation sound:

Enter play mode and hit the menu button

Select the Theme tab

Disable ‘Operation Sound’ (it give you a little menu of sounds — all terrible)

Select the Tools tab

Turn Mute Off

You can now go to ‘Sound Recorder’ under the Play tab and listen to the tracks you’ve recorded.

{pictures TK}