All posts by G Dan Mitchell

My pictures suck… and so do yours!

From Mike Johnson’s article (“The Magic Bullet”) at Luminous Landscape:

To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody’s pictures suck, that’s how. I’ve seen Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand’s exposures sucked. It’s the way it is.

—–

Fletcher Lake Detail

FletcherLakeDetail2005|08|27: Fletcher Lake Detail. Yosemite National Park. August 27, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
Fletcher Lake Detail. Yosemite National Park. August 27, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

This is a somewhat different version of a shot I posted a couple of days ago. It shows some late-season greenery at Fletcher Lake in Yosemite’s backcountry.

Because of the wide dynamic range between the sunlit rocky slopes in the background and the shaded lake in the foreground, this image is a combination of two photos shot at different exposures. I created two Photoshop layers, each containing one of the original RAW files as a “smart object” so that I could edit them in the RAW converter before using masks and some other tricks to combine them.
—–

HIkers at Ireland Like

IrelandLakeHikers2005|08|27: Hikers at Ireland Lake. Yosemite National Park. August 27, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
Day Hikers at Ireland Lake. Yosemite National Park. August 27, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

This group of hikers had come up for the day from their base camp on the Tuolumne River in Lyell Canyon.
—–

Fletcher Lake and Vogelsang Peak

FletcherVogelsang2005|08|27: Fletcher Lake and Vogelsang Peak. Yosemite National Park. August 28, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
Fletcher Lake and Vogelsang Peak. Yosemite National Park. August 27, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

This is another photo from last weekend’s pack trip out of Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. This picture was taken at sunset and includes the lower end of Fletcher Lake in the foreground and Vogelsang Peak in the distance, slightly obscured by haze from a nearby forest fire.

—–