Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

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}

All things Palin are of intense interest right now and on Saturday morning the editors assigned me to be the multimedia guy at her “Welcome Home/Goodbye Rally” in Anchorage (she arrived in Alaska on Wednesday, then hopped a plane of Nevada right after the event ended on Saturday). Bob Hallinen, the Daily News photographer assigned to cover her appearances in Fairbanks, reported restricted press access so I decided to skip the press line and go in as a member of the public and cover the rally with my G9.

Turns out access in Anchorage was not a problem (our adn.com gallery is here) but it was an interesting exercise to see what I could capture with my point-and-shoot. All the files (audio, video and still) that went into the video came from the G9 — and I even managed to shoot a protester getting (gently) hauled away, so I had the spot news covered as well.

Wish the stage lights didn’t blast the video but all-in-all I think it was a success.

And much easier on my back.