I came to this ridge overlooking Mono Basin and the Eastern Sierra well before sunrise. My intention was to photograph some extensive aspen groves along with other landscape subjects as the morning light arrived. It turned out that I was too late in the season for these aspens — I should have remembered that their drop leaves early — so I worked those other subjects as sunrise began to light up the terrain.
Continue reading First Light on Bare Aspens
If you have been following recent posts, I may be starting to sound like a broken record. But here, again, I photographed a subject that I had not noticed until very recently, even though I’ve passed by scores of times and likely looked straight towards it without “seeing” it.This small cascade descends from the heights of an Eastern Sierra canyon. In my defense, there’s a lot of other stuff to see nearby, and the cascade is only visible from a rather small location.
Continue reading Autumn Cascade
One of the advantages of returning to the same subjects over the years is that this gives your vision for them time to evolve. Here I speak not just of aspens in general, but of this particular grove of trees. Some years ago, while photographing a different nearby subject, a large grove further up the hillside caught my attention. It posed two challenges. First, getting close to the grove would be extremely difficult. Second, it always seemed to have lost its leaves when the other trees I came to see were at their color peak.
Continue reading Aspen Thicket
There are little personal spots all over the Sierra Nevada that I return to each year — a bend in a road, a tree, a favorite rock, a viewpoint. These trees are on that list. I suspect that most passers-by might not really notice them. They are along a route to a different popular place, and there’s a good chance that most people are thinking more about that destination. And when people leave that other spot, their attention may well be focused on the road more than on a couple of trees. But I notice, and I stop almost every time.
Continue reading Autumn Aspen Leaves