Twilight Moon. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Twilight moon over a Yosemite backcountry lake.
The last few hours of daylight and the first hour or so after sunset are prime times for landscape photography. (The same is true for the comparable hours around sunrise.) I am often surprised to find myself alone at this time of day, even when I’m photographing near large campgrounds. In the morning everyone is still zipped in their sleeping bags, and in the evening I suppose they are busy eating dinner. I occasionally want to head back into those campgrounds and tell people! But then I remember how much I enjoy the solitude at these extraordinary moments.
This photograph was made in the company of a group of folks, photographers all, who understand. We are out of our tents in pre-sunrise darkness, and we return to camp to attend to our needs for food and coffee hours later. We head out again in the late afternoon, and the last of us stumbles back into camp well after dark, navigating by the light of a headlamp. On this evening I had followed that pattern, doing a wide solo loop around this lake and photographing as the golden hour light came on, then continuing right through to the dusk hours when only a bit of the fading sunset color remained.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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Here’s one example, made in the eastern Sierra a few years back: http://gallery.gdanmitchell.com/gallery/var/albums/NaturalWorld/TheLandscape/California/SierraNevada/OtherSierraNevada/Color/TwilightRidgeLake08302019.jpg
There’s also a favorite series of wave cloud photographs I made one evening in Tuolumne, where I started photographing the subject before sunset and kept going right through a very long exposure in twilight.
Dan
Oh, yes I recollect that now with respect to your Central Valley work. What’s much less familiar to me is such photos from your Sierra catalog. In any case this is quite beautiful — particularly appreciate the delicate squiggle of moonlight on the lake.
Just lovely!
Thanks, Liz!
Beautiful Dan. I do my best to be a member of the edge light club myself. Funny I was recently thinking to myself that I couldn’t remember a shot of yours that was obviously pre sunrise or post sunset, and then you go and post one!
Hi Ward, and thanks for dropping by!
Let’s incorporate the “Edge Club” and draw up some by-laws, OK?
I have quite a few photographs made in that kind of light, though I probably have not posted too many recently. But among my favorite situations to shoot in that light is the end of day light when I’m photographing birds in the Central Valley. I often move from the usual “telephoto aimed at the birds” photography to shooting the evening sky and landscape at the end of the day. And I typically begin the photography on those days before the sun rises.
Dan
You’re right, images look way better here than evil FB.
Thanks. Truth is they would look better here even if that platform wasn’t evil. Like all of the social media sites, they compress essentially all uploaded files (and sometimes do worse things to them) so that they can handle the bandwidth issues. The original postings here are the least compressed versions I put online.
Thanks for dropping by and commenting!
Dan
L’heure blue at its finest! Beautiful!
Such a wonderful time of day that Guerlain even named one of their legacy fragrances after it! From the website:
“The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour… The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light,” Jacques Guerlain liked to say. He was referring to his favourite moment, when “the night has not yet found its star”. It was this fleeting sensation that he tried to express in 1912 with L’Heure Bleue.”
It is a phenomenal time in so many ways. Between the midnight and noon poles (where light is quite static) lie these two moments of rapid and beautiful transition, where the landscape is at its most dynamic. (“Dynamic” here in the sense of “in motion” — the opposite of “static.”)
I’ve often wondered why and how it is that we seem programmed to respond to this time and this light in the way that we do.
Dan