I just was alerted that B&H has a 24 hour-only$50 off on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 sale. It is available for both Mac and Windows. If you have been waiting, this might be a good opportunity to act!
NOTE: There was a problem with this link when I first posted it, but it should work now.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
The earth’s dusk earth shadow rises behind the folds of an oak and grass-covered Sierra Nevada foothill ridge on a late-summer evening
We had been in Mariposa, along the road heading towards Yosemite Valley, to meet up with friends and do various other fun things. As is often the case, at one point the conversation turned toward the photographic possibilities for later in the day. As the horrendous “Rim” fire was burning a few ridges over along the boundaries of the park, one thought was to find a high viewpoint and try to photograph the huge smoke clouds and the light from the flames during the dusk hours. A suggestion was offered by a person who knows the area concerning a gravel back-road to the top of an area ridge from which a good view might be obtained, so we decided to give that a try. It was a beautiful early evening – no smoke here – as we drove through oak and grass-covered hills below Mariposa to pick up this route and then ascended toward the ridge to turn off on the gravel road. From the junction we could see columns of smoke from burning forest to our north, but there was also a pretty clear “No Trespassing” sign posted along the road… so we decided that we should double-check our directions before risking a citation, and we headed back down the mountain.
The alternative plan had been to simply photograph the beautiful foothills themselves as the day came to an end. In this area there are many beautiful valleys of rolling hills covered with dry grassland and oak forests that sometimes thin to individual trees. We headed along a little back road and soon arrived at our main route shortly before the last sunlight was about to fade. Driving as we looked, we finally stopped at a turnout right after the sun had dropped below the horizon, where we could see the boundary between the last pink color in the sky and the rising blue line of the earth’s shadow. I used a long lens to make a small number of exposures shooting across the hillside patterns towards an oak-topped ridge with the dusk sky beyond.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Lush ferns grow along a trail through rain forest at Olympic National Park
On this day we initially planned to make a quick foray to North Cascades National Park, but I got a call saying that Olympic Peninsula web cams were showing relatively clear skies and that I should think about changing plans – so I did! Instead of heading north from the Seattle area, we headed west and took the ferry across Puget Sound, arriving to find clearing fog and some partial clouds, but quite a bit of sunlight. Taking the advice of someone who knows the Pacific Northwest better than I do, our plan was to first shoot down in the rain forest and then to head up to Hurricane Ridge near the end of the day.
We started at Sol Duc falls, a short one-mile hike from a parking area at the end of a side road. My mental image of these forests involves lush growth, cloudy conditions, and rain. The first was present, but both the clouds and the rain were missing. In some ways that could be a good thing, but shooting in the forest in the midday sun poses major problems. The main issue is so-called “pizza light,” with deep shadows and bright, sunlit highlights mixed together throughout the scene. When we got to the waterfall, that is precisely what we found. The fall is in a narrow gorge – and while the bottom of the gorge was in deep shade, beams of direct sunlight were striking the white water of the fall. While it might be possible to make a photograph of this subject in such conditions, it made a lot more sense to me to turn my attention to smaller scale subject that allowed me to better control the light – and this close up “intimate landscape” of a twisting group of ferns is one of the results.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Update: Shortly after I posted this, my reports on highway 120 through the park via the Tuolumne Meadows area were rendered incorrect/outdated by way of an updated announcement from the park service as follows:
“Beginning at 12:00pm on Wednesday, August 28th, Tuolumne Meadows and the High Sierra will only be accessible via Highway 120 East through Lee Vining. The Tioga Rd/Hwy 120 East will be temporarily closed between White Wolf Lodge and the Big Oak Flat Rd./Hwy 120 West at Crane Flat; the closure is estimated to be 3 to 4 days. Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, the High Sierra Camps, and Tuolumne Meadows and Porcupine Flat campgrounds all remain open.”
Basically, this means that you will not be able to use highway 120 as a route across the Sierra until further notice. I’m not surprised – in fact, I’ve been somewhat surprised that the road remained open this long. Apparently the following URL is also a good source of updates from the park: http://www.yosemitepark.com/yosemite-fire-update.aspx
Note: All of which brings me back to my original statement that I don’t have inside information on this fire, and that anyone traveling to the area needs to check official sources for conditions updates. I will likely not update this page as things change, so the information posted here should be regarded as potentially being out of date!
My original post follows…
—
A few people have asked me for information about the “Rim” fire which started not far from Groveland near highway 120, and which is currently burning along the northwest boundary of Yosemite National Park, generally moving east and north toward the highway 108 area. While I know much of this area fairly well from many years (decades, actually) of visits, I do not have any inside information about the fire itself, nor am I an expert on wildfires. One good source of (limited but objective) information is the Stanislaus National Forest Rim Fire Incident web page. A map on this page is a quite amazing source of information, especially when combined with some familiarity with the area and a reading of various written reports. (The version on the main page seems to be based on Google Maps, and allows you to scroll around and zoom in.) Lots of folks who live and work in the area are sharing updates on the usual social media sites. The Mariposa Gazette is another local news source.
The fire started on August 17 more or less midway between Groveland and the northwest park entrance and not far off of the highway 120 corridor near the Rim of the World area overlooking the canyon of the Tuolumne River. (Highway 120 is a common route for entry to the park from the west and northwest, and it connects via Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Pass to the east side of the Sierra at the town of Lee Vining.) The spread of the fire at first was somewhat quick, which is no surprise given the extremely dry conditions in the Sierra following a second very dry winter and almost no real precipitation since late 2012. Then, between about August 20 and 23, the fire exploded, expanding very quickly to cover a huge area generally to the east and north of the starting point, with the fire generally racing northeast but also spreading to the north and south. Continue reading About the Yosemite “Rim” fire… and more→
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
