Meadow, Trees, Granite Wall. Yosemite Valley, California. October 31, 2013.© Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
The immense granite face of Cathedral Rocks looms behind trees of El Capitan Meadow in autumn afternoon light
This meadow, located between two of the largest cliffs in Yosemite Valley, is both an obvious place to make photographs – everyone does it – and a place of nearly infinite variations of light, season, and atmosphere. Sometimes when I’m in the Valley I may stop here two or three times during the day. As is the case in other spots in Yosemite Valley, the place changes radically depending upon what the light is doing – soft early morning or evening light, strong light coming down the Valley in the early morning, light blocked by cliffs at midday, strong backlight in the late afternoon. And many of these changes happen very rapidly. As I made this photograph I could virtually watch the shadow move over the trees from the right.
The granite face rising beyond this meadow – one of the two I mentioned above – has always attracted me for some reason. Although not as high as the much more famous El Capitan, in some ways it seems to me to look more forbidding. It seems to lack the obvious crack systems seen on El Capitan, and unlike the larger wall, which is often bathed in sun, this one is often in shadow. In winter it casts a shadow across this portion of the Valley in the middle of the day, though a low spot may allow a beam of light to sweep across this area in the late afternoon.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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.