Morning Light, Haze, El Capitan. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Beams of early morning sunlight pass through haze to illuminate El Capitan
I’m coming to think of the start of this particular day in lower Yosemite Valley as being “Bierstadt Day.” Albert Bierstadt was a landscape painter who made several notable renderings of Yosemite subjects in the 1800s, paintings that perhaps formed the image for the park for many who saw them. They are not “realistic” in a photographic sense, but tend toward exaggerating features and using dramatic effects of perspective, atmosphere, and light. When I see Bierstadt paintings I often think both of how they evoked the wonder of seeing remarkable places like Yosemite Valley and of how flexibly and subjectively he treated these subjects. I also think about how little they look like the literal place, as least in objective sense.
However, at certain moments, the quality of light and atmosphere came close on this morning. The morning began inauspiciously, and in the pre-dawn light I could tell that it was cloudy and gray. However, as I approached the Valley from Wawona there were breaks in the clouds. Arriving at my first clear viewpoint, the iconic tunnel view (where I usually wouldn’t stop on my way into the Valley), the view included the usual Valley features, layers of drifting clouds and mist, and beams of colorful light playing across this landscape. I put a long lens on my camera and began to follow the changing conditions, picking out small sections of the grand view that seemed most interesting. At the moment of this photograph (and, indeed, the light lasted only a moment) sun beams broke through the clouds and moved in front of the face of El Capitan.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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