Welcome,

First Light is the online home of the wilderness journeys, various retreats, private counseling, and photographic images, of Michael Eller.

From Michael…

The making of a photograph in nature can be the mirror image of change in our lives. Sometimes, after all the effort of getting there and the hopeful focus of pre-visualization, the light never seems to come...the anticipated change, more a reflection on the process. Yet, the possibility can happen in an instant right where we are, prepared or not. We are able to move with it, responding out of the quality of our life practice or fumble with the equipment in frustration...with the old concepts of self. I could certainly go much further with the analogies, but what I would like to share is one story...one moment, when the efforts, timing, place and the craft came together.

In the long twilight of the North, there would be no stars this Solstice night. I'd been climbing since sunset through the forest and brush, whistling and singing to the phantom possibility of encountering some resident black bear. I was in earnest to find an image that might convey the power of this turning season and to witness the miracle of summer's longest light.

The town of Seward, Alaska lay far below. It's long harbor, once destroyed by a massive tsunami in the 1964 9.2 earthquake, makes entrance to the wondrous, complex world of the Kenai Fjords. Bordered on each side by glaciered peaks rising out of the shoreline, the still thick snow of winter shown luminous with the pinks and blues of this extended dawn. I had only arrived in Alaska a few days before, so moving in such continuous light was still fresh, equally exciting, and perplexing.

Call it the instincts of many years of mountaineering or a moment of fortune. As I finally pushed above tree line and turned a blind corner, what opened before me was a hidden cirque of wild rushing snowmelt, steep spires, and the colors of first alpine flowers. The pure exhilaration and surprise of being in that place, at that particular juncture of time was all about the energy of summer's deep urging to venture and embrace outwardly...to create and extend. As the halo of brightness behind the distant ridge grew ever so slowly into the instant first rays, I opened the shutter.