Sunset Avalanche, Half Dome. Yosemite National Park, California. January 16, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
An avalanche breaks loose from the edge of Half Dome as sunset light falls over Yosemite Valley.
Sometimes timing is everything. But, to be honest, luck often plays a bigger part! :-)
On my way out of The Valley on a mid-January weekend, I made this spot my last stop, thinking that I wanted a photograph from this angle at sunset with snow on Half Dome. (I have a number of photographs of this location, but mostly from the warmer months of the year. ) I know this spot well enough at this point that I know pretty much exactly where to be and when to be there, and this was no exception. On the way up here I first stopped to photograph some trees on a ridge across the Valley, something I worked on more than once during this trip. When the last light left those trees I headed on up the road to this overlook and arrived perhaps a full half hour before the start of the real light show. I hung out a bit, ate a snack, and eventually set up.
I never know exactly what will happen here, believe it or not, even though I understand the process pretty well. The foreground right ridge first falls into shadow, then the shadow line begins to creep up toward the face of Half Dome and rise up the rocky slope in front of El Capitan at the left. But what the sky will do during this transition is quite variable. Sometimes the sunset simply dies out with a whimper. On other evenings the light goes through a remarkable sequence of transitions. That is what finally happened on this evening. Eventually I’ll share some of the other photographs from this evening, but for now I’ll just share a hint or two. The color of the sky behind Half Dome transitioned from blue to pink and purple and finally to a deep blue that verged on purple.
But the real surprise – and one I did not realize I had captured it until I got home and looked closely at my raw files – was that one of the images contained a sort of “Yosemite Fall” that I had never seen before, namely the “snow fall” created as a large piece of the snow field near the edge of Half Dome let loose after a day of warm sun and cascaded down the right face of the mountain… just as sunset light split the dome! I suppose this provides yet another opportunity to quote Ansel, who apparently once said, “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
We cannot overemphasize the role of good fortune in getting certain photographs – I know I depend on it quite a bit and I understand that I cannot possible foresee, much less control, all of the factors that make a photograph of many of my subjects work.
As I thought back on this shoot, I finally recalled how it is that I captured this “snow fall” and didn’t know it. It all comes down to a combination of the gear I was using, how I had to approach timing my shots, and where this made me focus my attention. First, Half Dome is quite a distance from the location from which I was shooting. That’s why this photograph was made with a 400mm focal length lens! The subject was far enough away that I might not have even noticed this “fall” if I had been looking right at the Dome with eyes rather than through the viewfinder. Second, there was a bit of breeze that evening – enough that I was concerned about the effect of camera/lens vibration on sharpness. (Keep in mind that I was shooting at some pretty long exposure times for such a long focal length.) One way that I ensure that I will click the shutter at a moment when wind is not affecting the camera is to use Live View at 10X magnification. This lets me look very closely at a small area of the scene, and at this magnification I can quickly see when the image is jiggling or perfectly still.
So, put all of this together and it makes sense that I never saw this actually happen, yet was fortunate enough to capture it. If I had been looking directly at the mountain I probably wouldn’t have seen it due to the distance. While I was most likely continuously monitoring the electronic viewfinder, it was showing only a very small portion of the image at 10X magnification, and it was most certainly not this part of the scene. My general timing of the shot had to do with color and placement of shadows and so forth, but my immediate press of the shutter release was determined simply by the image in the electronic viewfinder becoming very still during a short pause in the wind.
Lucky, no? :-)
Dan
Nice timing Dan! Like you said, many times I’m glad luck is on my side. If this was taken from where I think, then I was near there back in December…in the rain. I agree with everyone’s comments, the highlight on the trees adds a wonderful sense of depth to this photograph.
The trunks of the trees glow in a way that’s hard to miss. I agree with Chris Marks that even with everything else that’s going on in this image — including the bonus thousand-foot snowfall — they are the feature of this captured vision that my eyes keep coming back to. Thanks for this treat, Dan.
The lighting, composition and subject (of course) are so lovely. What really keeps catching my eye though are the trees in the foreground. I almost feel like I can reach out and touch them because of the way they stand out from the shadows.
Chris, those trees in that light are among my favorite features of this view. I think carefully about them in terms of the light and their position when I shoot from here. I’m pleased that you notice them!
Dan
I noticed that you didn’t mention where your shooting location is located, was that an oversight ;)
Great capture though!
Thanks for the comment, Ed! I don’t always identify locations precisely – particularly in two circumstances. One is when the location is fragile and too much attention might hurt the very thing that I photographed or the area from which I made the photograph. (That isn’t the problem here.) The second is when the location can probably be found pretty easily by a visitor. In this case, the view is from an easily accessible location on one of the roads into Yosemite Valley.
Dan
Perfect
This is gorgeous! That shadow is just incredible…
I would love to visit this place someday…