Lake, Ridges, Evening Light. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Mountaintop trees stand above a sub-alpine lake, dome, and ridge in evening light, Yosemite National Park.
This photograph (and its appearance here) is a bit unusual for me, though not entirely unprecedented. It is a photograph that I have shared previously, back when I originally made it some years ago. During the last year and a half I have had plenty of opportunities to revisit older work. Mostly this has meant exploring raw file archives to locate work that was “left behind,” but which turned out to be interesting and valuable in retrospect — photographs that I felt deserved a first showing. But this case represents something different — the rethinking of a photograph that I thought I had finished.
Revisiting and revising one of my previously-shared photographs usually leads to some relatively obvious changes. But in this case I think that changes may be subtle. Theres a small change in how it is cropped, some new ideas about how to handle the foreground light, some important but small changes to the middle forest and peak just beyond the lake, and some new adjustments to the sky. In my view, it is perfectly natural and good to revisit the original interpretation of a photograph over time, a process that was perhaps more common in the film era.
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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Thank you for working hard to share this beauty! My husband and I do much necessary animal rescue here in Houston, it really limits my ability to travel since I usually have a ‘needy’ animal that I am fostering. So I travel through your page!! All the beauty without the hassle!
Thanks!
That was one of the trickier things about this photograph, and something that I “reinterpreted” a bit in this updated version. The light in the more distant portions of the scene was warm, but not like that light on the foreground. For that reason, the balance between these elements had seemed “off” to me, with too much weight on that foreground due to the intensely warm light. So I toned that down a bit — I know, it is still intense — by using a bit less saturation and by darkening things a bit. I also reconsidered some cropping decisions — mostly having to do with some subtle things that probably aren’t very obvious to most viewers, thought I think that they do have a larger effect than we might imagine.
Dan
IMHO….I love the foreground light!