I have been on the road for the last month, and a big part of that was shooting a major assignment in Alaska. This year we shot nearly 7000 images on a shoot for Alaska tourism. Weather can always be a challenge in Alaska, and this summer was a particularly gray, wet summer. But I have some kind of weather karma in Alaska, not sure why, and despite days of rainy weather our second day there turned out to be incredible blue skies and sunshine. We raced north to photograph Denali from a new trail, and had a fantastic day with many hours of shooting with Denali in the distance.
Back home in the office, I started the long process of editing the images down to the best selection. One image I really liked is the one above. But zooming in to 100% to check for dust, I noticed dust…lots of dust. I couldn’t imagine my sensor was that dirty, so I zoomed in closer. I wasn’t looking at dust, but instead I realized mosquitos were swarming around my models. Honestly, Alaska is unjustly labeled as having tons of mosquitos; I have seen worse in the mountains of Wyoming. But at this spot there seemed to be a recent hatch, and it was causing problems with my image.
Instead of dust spotting, I was mosquito spotting on my computer. Getting rid of the little buggers was easy enough, just use spot removal tool. But it took me close to 40 minutes to get rid of all of those nasty insects. Glad the rest of our shoot was insect free, or I would be still be editing my images.