Grazing Cattle and Aspen Groves, Conway Summit. Sierra Nevada, California. October 10, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Cattle graze in front of large aspen groves near Conway Summit, California.
Just about anyone who has every photographed aspens in the area around Lee Vining is probably familiar with this location – and I’ve certainly shot there quite a few times. From highway 395 the aspens extend west and up toward the peaks of the Sierra crest, and the at the right hour in the late afternoon the backlight can light up the leaves of the trees. When I visited this time the trees were in transition with some still green, others very colorful, and some almost leafless already. I was also lucky to have some clouds at the end of several cloudless days of photography. (Normal people like perfect blue sky, but photographers are not normal – we tend to like weather!) When I saw the clouds starting to form above the crest early in the afternoon I thought that something interesting might happen later near Conway so I made a point of heading that direction.
This photograph features, of all things, cattle – not my usual subject, perhaps! The area where these aspens grow seems to be at least as much a pasture as it is aspen groves, and I’ve seen cattle grazing in this spot before. (See comments for a note from a member of the family that owns the land.) As the clouds created shadows over the higher slopes in the background, for a moment the sun still hit the foreground trees and these cattle.
This shot also ties in with my recent post on using various focal lengths for landscape photography, in that this photograph was made with what some might regard as an unlikely landscape lens, a 100-400mm zoom! But in this case, this lens at 250mm was just what I needed to more tightly frame the bit of foreground pasture and sunlit trees and compress the distance between them and the shadowed hills beyond.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
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Hello, Mr. Mitchell……I am certainly in awe of your photographic expertise, but I must correct a misconception you have about the grazing cattle you photographed on Conway Summit; that is private property, not open range. The area the cattle are in is owned by my husband’s family, having been owned by the Chichesters for approximately 70 years.
We enjoy the beautiful shots you take of this area, as you definitely capture the essence of the Sierras and the surrounding environs. We look forward to more of the same!!
Regards, Carly Chichester
Hi Carly.
Thanks for setting me straight on that. I’m afraid that as a “city slicker” I was a bit careless with my terminology!
That is a beautiful area, and I’ve always been intrigued by those clearings down among the aspens. You can be sure that I’ll photograph the area many more times!
It is great to connect this spot that I love so much with an actual person – and family – who live on that land, or at least have a very close and long standing relationship to it. Although my initial introduction to the Sierra was by way of camping (and later climbing and skiing and photography), along the way I have come to recognize and be more and more interested in the folks whose long connection to the range comes in other forms. Sometime I would love to have an opportunity to make these people and their lives a subject for my photography.
What would be a good way to identify that area where the cattle are – Chichester Ranch? Something else?
Take care,
Dan