A flock of pelicans turns toward Waddell Creek Beach along the Pacific coast of California.
This group was photographed a few seconds before I photographed the single overhead pelican that I posted a couple of days ago. Here the flock had turned back towards the land in preparation for rising to the edge of a much higher bluff just to the north.
Since I so recently described the circumstances of this shoot, I’ll keep this text short!
A low flying pelican passes overhead against clearing coastal fog and blue sky.
This pelican was part of a very large group that flew directly over my position along the Pacific Ocean coast north of Santa Cruz, California. One of the main tricks to photographing these wonderful bird – though not the only trick – is figuring out where to photograph them. They are very common along the coastline of “my” part of California, the area from just north of San Francisco south to the Big Sur area below Monterey and Carmel. But in many places you’ll watch them fly past too far out over the water, or below you such that they don’t make easy photographic targets. But by spending a bit of time along the coast, I’ve begun to understand their patterns a bit, and I now know a few places where I’m fairly likely to find them flying very close or even directly overhead.
We had spotted this group along the top of a bluff where they often fly by as they coast along on the updrafts from the onshore winds. (One thing I’ve never been able to figure out is that the almost always are flying from south to north. Are they taking the train back south so that they can repeat the trip? Do they just keep going? Do they only make on flight? It is a mystery to me!) We had just missed photographing this large flock as they came by, but I had a hunch that they might come down close to the water at a location just north where the road drops to a beach where a creek enters the ocean. So we headed there, parked the car, and a few minutes later we saw the flock appear around the cliffs to the south and descend toward the beach. As they came to our position they began to turn inland and climb towards the next bluff, and as this happened the birds flew directly over my position.
Alpenglow lights Mount Conness above Lower Young Lake in the Yosemite National Park back-country.
I was recently going through a large portion of my archive in search of a variety of photographs of Mount Conness, a well-known peak along the northeast edge of Yosemite National Park on the crest of the Sierra. This is perhaps not the best known peak in Yosemite for most people – they are obviously going to be far more familiar with the cliffs and domes around Yosemite Valley or with Mount Lyell (the tallest peak in the park) or perhaps Mount Dana (second highest peak, and towering above the Tioga Pass entrance.) Mount Conness is found a bit further “north” along the crest, and while it may be less known, it is certainly no less visible once you know where to look. You can see it in the distance towering above Tenaya Lake if you stop at the iconic Olmsted Point overlook. It is visible from many places along the road to Tuolumne Meadows. Once you get away from roads and into the high country it can be seen from almost any high point with an open view in the direction of the peak, including places like Vogelsang High Sierra Camp.
This photograph was made on a quiet late-season evening at Lower Young Lake, a place that I return to frequently, most of the time in the off-season when fewer people are there and the fall colors of the high country are starting to appear. The peak (and many other features in this area) are beautifully illuminated late in the day as this high ridge is open without obstruction to the west. The light on the peak was magical on this evening, being colorful and contrasting with the higher and more drab clouds, but not being as gaudily bright as it can be on other evenings.
Tule Elk walking across grassland at Point Reyes National Seashore, California.
I know I promised that the previous one would be the last… but, yes, one more tule elk photograph. (For now? ;-) This one was slightly apart from the others in the group as they began to move off to the right, and I managed to time this photograph so that the others were out of the frame. Beyond that… perhaps not a lot new to say about photographs of tule elk at Point Reyes! :-)
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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