Meadow grasses made shiny by autumn rain, Yosemite Valley, California.
This fall I have been “playing around” with photographs of very dense and detailed vegetation. (Two other recent related photographs include one of aspen leaves and one of creek dogwood.) This is a difficult thing, especially with a subject whose colors seem somewhat muted, but if it works the largish prints can work both by revealing some form that might be difficult to see in all the detail and by presenting the detail itself. (As much as many of us rightfully point out that sharpness is not everything, sometimes it is pretty important!)
I noticed the subject of this photograph while shooting something quite different. I was standing in a meadow near Curry Village in light rain and using a very long lens to photograph mist and clouds drifting among trees and spires high on the Yosemite Valley rim when I happened to look down at my feet. (Always a good idea to look at the other stuff when shooting a specific subject that you came for.) I noticed the shapes of the grasses and the mixture of greens and browns with the “cool” light from the cloudy conditions. Since I couldn’t shoot this subject with the lens I was using at the moment, I went back to the other subject and made a mental note to switch lens and pay some attention to the grasses when I finished.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
This photograph of this scene was made a bit earlier than the companion photograph that I posted yesterday – here there is a much warmer tone to the light since it is only shortly after sunset. (For those who didn’t see yesterdays long post, these old pilings used to support a pier near the town of Davenport, along the California coast just north of Santa Cruz.)
This photograph was made with a slightly long exposure time of six seconds, with the idea obviously being to allow wave motion to smooth out the texture of the water’s surface. A six-second exposure is not nearly long enough to really smooth out the features of the water, and you can still see localized lower and higher areas from the incoming waves. Interestingly, the birds on the tops of the structures – barely visible here but clearly visible in larger versions – barely move at all after sunset. You might not even notice the movement in this exposure and even in the three-minute exposure that I made a bit later the birds are mostly still!
Although I rarely do so, in this photograph I stopped down all the way to f/22. The concern with that aperture on a full frame DSLR is that some visible diffraction blur may begin to appear. Indeed, if I inspect this photograph at 100% magnification, there is a slight softening of fine detail – just as I knew there would be. I chose to use the longer aperture because it allowed me to double the exposure time without using neutral density filters, and I was willing to do so here because absolute sharpness is much less important to this image than it might be in other cases.
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“Abandoned Pier, Dusk” — The pilings of a long-abandoned pier on the Pacific coast near Davenport, California.
Besides being a matter of hours from the Sierra Nevada and less than a day’s drive from places like Death Valley, I can be at the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz in barely more than a half hour. Yesterday it looked like evening conditions might be interesting so I headed over there in the late afternoon. As I crossed the mountains on my way there I was pleasantly surprised to see low clouds over the ridges and some higher clouds over towards the ocean, which got my hopes up for some sort of spectacular evening light. However, when I actually got the the coast the conditions were not as interesting – mostly clear with just a bit of cloudiness on the horizon, and no interesting haze or mist over the water. Either that or I just wasn’t “seeing it” this time. So, after stopping for a cup of coffee, I headed up the coast from Santa Cruz and stopped at several of the usual locations, but didn’t make a single exposure. At the northernmost point on my drive I stopped right by the water and it looked like interesting light might be five or ten minutes away… and then the sun dropped below some low clouds near the horizon and the light died!
I think I’ve learned to go with the flow when this happens. I react in several ways. One is to look around for subjects other than those that I thought I was there for. With that in mind I thought about photographing shore birds… but there was only one forlorn seagull down near the water. I saw an interesting pool of water on the beach and thought it might play into a seascape photograph, but the flat light and cloudless sky was not working. I remembered a spot a bit further south where I had once shot some shoreline shoals from the top of a steep cliff at sunset, so I quickly drove up that way… and couldn’t find them!
I had one final thought. On the way north I had seen a group of photographers on the bluff near the northern edge of Davenport. I had stopped, leaving my camera equipment in the car, and quickly dashed out to where they were set up to see what was so interesting. Below their position were the four remaining supports from an old pier that washed away many years ago. It looked interesting and I recognized the structure from photographs that others have made from down on the beach – but I hadn’t been up for the steep descent to the beach so I had driven on after making a mental note about a position from which I thought a photograph might be made. Now I realized that if I went straight there that I might be able to make some long exposures in the dying light and perhaps frame them so that they only contained the structures and the open sea. So, off I went.
I arrived just before the moment of sunset and, sure enough, the group of photographers I had seen earlier was still there. I grabbed my gear and quickly walked out to the point I had scoped out earlier, which was some distance from where they were set up. I framed up this composition and then photographed right though sunset until there wasn’t really enough light to keep shooting. (The group at one point looked like they thought the show was over and they were going to leave, but I think they saw me continuing to shoot and decided to stick around almost as long as I did.) The light just kept getting more interesting as it faded. Although it was too dark to really see the image as it appears here, I knew that this three minute exposure (intentionally lengthened by choosing a small aperture and low ISO) would smooth out the surface of the water but still show the shadows and reflections of the old pilings.
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Forest trees are almost completely obscured by evening fog in Yosemite Valley.
If you have been watching some of my recently posted photographs, you have perhaps figured out that I’m working on a series of photographs in which mist and fog and clouds obscure to a greater or lesser extent some underlying elements of the landscape. (If you haven’t been watching my recent posts… you can still be my friend! ;-) In a few of them I am seeing how far I can take this and still have an interesting photograph. This one marks a further step along that path in that at least half of the scene has little or no detail, being almost completely obscured by drifting fog, and even in the areas where trees are still visible the details are very muted.
I’m thinking about just how little detail I can retain in the scene and still retain a sense of form. And this isn’t the most extreme in the series at all. I’m working on another one which retains less “solid” detail than this one. (It may be that it works as a print but perhaps not as a web jpg, in which case I may not post it here – we’ll see.)
The photograph was made at – icon alert! – Wawona Tunnel View above Yosemite Valley on an evening when I had little interest in shooting the classic view of the Valley itself, but had instead gone there because I was almost certain that fog would form among the trees on the Valley floor as the temperature dropped following a rainy day. If anyone had noticed me shooting on that evening among the line-up of dozens of photographers, they might have been perplexed as to why I was aiming a very large lens down when the famous view was obviously straight ahead! ;-)
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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