Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light. Yosemite National Park, California. September 18, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Photographers Charles Cramer and Karl Kroeber working in golden hour light along the shore of a sub-alpine lake high in the Sierra Nevada back-country of Yosemite National Park.
Look! A photograph of people! :-)
I spent a week or so on the trail in the Yosemite back-country with a group of five other photographers this past September. We spent a good stretch of time in the area of some scenic lakes in the northeastern portion of the park. I was out for a week and a day, while the rest of the group spent a few additional days on the trail. Not too long after arriving at the nearby sub-alpine lake that was to be our home for several days, various members of the group started to explore the surrounding area, and on this evening we all decided to climb up the valley from “our” lake to the next higher lake along the drainage. We travelled more or less cross-country up the shallow valley of the creek between the two lakes, passing through beautiful meadows before arriving along the shore of this lake very late in the afternoon.
Once we arrived we more or less split up and focused on different portions of the lake and its surroundings. I mostly shot in one very small area where some beautiful granite boulders were embedded in the shoreline meadow, providing an interesting foreground for photographs across the lake to a nearby peak as the golden hour light arrived. At one point I noticed that my friends Charlie Cramer and Karl Kroeber were shooting nearby, so I paused from my landscape photography to pivot my camera in their direction and make a photograph of them as they worked the golden hour light.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.
Thanks for the post, Mark. It is true that when I include people in my photographs they often have a compositional role in the image. Sometimes, though, the subject actually is the person or the people. This is a sort of in-between image in that I think it does say something about the place itself, but it is also “about” the specific two individuals.
Charlie was a large format film photographer (and wonderful printer and master of dye transfer) for many years. In the last few years he has moved to digital medium format. (There is a link to his web site in the original post if you would like to see more of his beautiful photography and learn a bit more about him.)
Dan
It is rare that you include a person in one of your images unless it adds to the composition in a street scene.
I love this image for a couple of reasons. One, it shows more of the setting and the people you write about. Two, it is a great example of what “the golden hour” light looks like in a scene that is readily identifiable to the viewer.
As usual, great job.
A quick question: is one of them a medium/large format shooter? I ask because of the cardboard cutout on his wrist that a lot of photographers use to pre-visualize the scene before taking the time to set up their equipment.