(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)
“Two Islands, Fog” — Two grass covered islands in thick fog.
This simple-looking photograph represents a number of things that are important to me and to my photography — so I think it is worth adding to the “A Photograph Exposed” series.
I made the photograph on a late-autumn day in California’s Great Central Valley, a day that felt more like winter than like fall. We were there on one of the first trips of the season to photograph migratory birds in the Valley — geese, pelicans, herons, ibises, cranes, and more. In a typical autumn/winter season this is a place of fog, ponds, and amazing collections of migratory birds. On this morning it seemed to be mainly about the fog!
(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)
Black and white photograph of two “moving rocks” on the Racetrack Playa at Death Valley National Park. Morning light with unusual clouds, and the Grandstand in the distance.
Moving rocks, lenticular clouds — morning on the Racetrack Playa.
This photograph from Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa is one of the first I made when I began photographing this landscape seriously, and it remains one of my favorites from the park — yet it also carries a flaw that I’ll describe below.
My first visit to Death Valley National Park had been about seven years earlier at the very end of the previous millennium, when I was one of several adults accompanying a group of middle school and high school students on a visit that was to include a short backpack trip in the Cottonwood Canyon area. The story of that trip deserves its own article, one that would include snow, near-hypothermia, winds that blew down tents, a retreat from the pack trip, an attempt to hike down the upper portion of Death Valley, water shortages, a dust storm, a dangerous situation with a bus, and more.
I’ll never forget my first view of Death Valley on that first visit. We arrived in the park after dark, stopping between Towne Pass and Stovepipe Wells at a small campground a few thousand feet above the valley floor, where we set up in the darkness and went to sleep. Having never seen the Valley before, the next morning I unzipped my tent and stepped outside to see the stupendous “oh wow!” landscape of Death Valley and the mountains on the far side in the beautiful morning light. I was hooked, and I’ve been going back annually since then. Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: “Two Rocks, Morning, Racetrack Playa”→
Fog and haze obscure the winter skyline of downtown San Francisco, California.
It is unlikely that any view of San Francisco will be entirely unique, but I haven’t seen many other photographs of the City’s skyline that look quite like this one. It isn’t unusual for people who see the photograph (especially as a print) to ask, “Is that real?” It is as real as a photograph gets, and the conditions actually occurred — the only time I have seen them quite like this, with quite this soft and subtle atmosphere and light. (The post-processing on this photograph was relatively minimal, and a lot of it was about controlling the brightness of that bright cloud high in the sky.)
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I frequently drive north over the Golden Gate Bridge to photograph in the redwoods, along the coast, or at Point Reyes National Seashore. This usually means leaving home well before the sun rises, and depending on where I’m headed, I usually cross the bridge right around dawn. The plan is to pause and look at the scene in the early light and decide if something really interesting might happen — and it that seems probable I’ll photograph here for a while before moving on.
(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)
On the weekend of June 18-19 of this year I made a point of getting to Yosemite so that I could photograph the high country on the first day that Tioga Pass Road was open for the season. On a shoot like this, my subjects range from some that I planned to shoot ahead of time to some that were completely unanticipated. Among the many things that might affect my decisions is the light itself, and this is a story about that light… and perhaps a few other things, too.
I had driven to the park very early on Saturday morning and after photographing straight through the morning I finally made it over the pass and headed down to Lee Vining Canyon to find a campsite for that night. After getting up at 3:30 a.m. and driving to the Sierra from the SF Bay Area and then shooting all morning, I was exhausted! I pulled into the first available site, paid my fee, and promptly fell asleep in the car for perhaps an hour. When I woke up I set up my camp and at about 3:00 or so headed down to Lee Vining to get some “dinner” – on “photographer time,” dinner tends to either be very early or very late, and on this day I made it early so that I could be back up in the park well before the “good light” started.
Heading back up to Tioga Pass after my mid-afternoon dinner, I had a few subject ideas in mind. Tuolumne Meadows itself was one possibility, and I knew that I wanted to watch for any cascades or creeks that would be flowing in the spring snow-melt conditions. Tenaya Lake was another possibility, and a client’s interest in photographs of Mount Conness had me thinking about the possibility of a photograph from Olmsted Point that included ice-covered Tenaya Lake and this peak. Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: A Tale of Light→
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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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