Yankee Point and Cypress, Carmel Highlands, Dusk. Big Sur, California. January 2, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A Carmel Highlands cypress trees stands at the edge of a cliff above the Pacific Ocean and Yankee Point at dusk.
Oddly, this is a photograph that sort of “didn’t make the cut” the first time I went through the batch shortly after making the photographs in early 2010. I had spent the afternoon photographing further south in the Big Sur area and several other photographs from the set turned out more as I expected – and this one seemed like a sort of problem child photograph, so I didn’t take the time needed to work with it. Eventually I forgot about it as I went on to other projects.
The photo had been almost a bit of a grab shot. As I was heading north back up the coast, thinking I had finished my shooting and was now on the way home, I was stunned to catch a glimpse of some intense post-sunset light as I rounded the bend at the head of this cove in Carmel Highlands. I wasn’t certain that I could find a composition and work out a photograph in the brief interval the probably remained before the light faded, but I quickly put on the wide angle zoom, attached the camera to the tripod, and headed over to the edge of the bluff. Exposure was a terrible problem because the brilliant and very colorful sky was quite bright, while the close side of the foreground tree was nearly black. I made managed to shoot the scene a few times, shifting from landscape to portrait mode and making three bracketed exposures of each composition.
When I got home and looked at the raw files I think I decided that it was just going to be too much work for too little reward, and I instead went to work on more promising shots from earlier in the afternoon. This week I came upon the series of shots again and wondered what I could do with them. My first inclination was to go with the color, and I did come up with a portrait orientation image in color that I will probably post before long. Then, as I began to work on the landscape mode image, I started to see it as having potential as a monochrome image. I tried it. I liked it. And here it is!
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.
G Dan Mitchell Photography
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This is great Dan. I love it. It is reminiscent of the Pt. Lobos landscapes.
Thanks, Richard. I debated the idea of somehow including the Point Lobos ID with this photograph. I think that Point Lobos is almost visible from this spot – it is certainly in the neighborhood!
Dan
Thanks for your comments, David and Mike!
I have some theories about why certain photographs get passed over at first but turn out to work when we revisit them later. One idea is that, as backwards as it may seem, the ideas we had when we made the exposure about what the photograph should have been a) sometimes don’t turn out to be successful from that perspective and b) blind us to seeing the photograph in ways that we were not fully aware of at the time. Coming back to the photograph later sometimes lets me see the photograph as a photograph, without the immediate associations of the experience of being in the place and making the exposure – and in the end I learn something new about that subject that I had not recognized at the time.
Dan
Outstanding as usual Dan.
Dan,
Isn’t it funny how a little distance can bring you back to liking an image. This was well worth returning to, with all of the elements combining beautifully to create a certain mystery in the scene. I find myself trying to peek over the cliff, around the tree, and beyond the nearest headland and rocks. I will look forward to other renditions :)