Cliff’s Edge, Winter Mist. Yosemite Valley, California. February 28, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Winter mist and snow swirl above the edge of Yosemite Valley cliffs
We spent three days in Yosemite Valley near the end of February and through the first day of March. The weather forecast had been for snow all the way down to the Valley floor, so we thought our timing appeared to be perfect — there are few things more beautiful than this valley in new snow. Unfortunately, as seems to have been the typical pattern this winter, the snow didn’t amount to much. I had a five-minute flurry while photographing in one of the meadows very early in the morning, and a drive up and out of the Valley to higher points put us in light snowfall for a while.
To make this photograph I stopped at an iconic location, but then I looked up rather than in the direction where the famous view lay. With a long lens on my camera I was able to compose little vignettes highlighting bits of the near vertical world where the highlands area meet the upper rims of the cliffs dropping into the Valley. Here mist and light snowfall blows across the slanting terrain just above the void. Most of the image is relatively obscured — the foreground cliff is dark enough to mute many details, and near the top of the frame the mist is lit intensely by the sun.
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.