Commentary, Locations

Photographing Death Valley – Part 2

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NOTE: THIS IS NOT A FINISHED POST – IT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS…

(This article is an experiment in web publishing. Rather that keeping this article hidden until it is finished, I’m going to make a link to this draft version available and let folks watch it evolve and even comment if they are so inclined. With that in mind, a few assumptions going into this:

  1. Since this is a draft version of a work in progress, there are no guarantees of accuracy!
  2. Material that appears in the draft may or may not appear in the final version – heck, it may change while you are viewing it!
  3. Helpful comments are welcome and even encouraged. For various reasons – including a desire to control the length of the final piece – I can’t guarantee that I’ll respond to or include all contributions.
  4. Since my approach to writing is often to spew lots of words and go back later to trim (some of) the excess verbiage, excuse the inevitable “wordiness” of the draft.
  5. If this works, I may try it with future posts. If it doesn’t, I might change my mind about this one!
  6. When the (what passes for) final version of the post is created, the material at this URL may disappear and it will become available at a new URL.

Thanks,

Dan)

This material is current unavailable while revisions are underway. Thanks for your understanding…

Also, more (but not all!) of my Death Valley photography is found here:https://gdanmitchell.com/gallery/v/NaturalWorld/TheLandscape/Desert/DeathValley/

Site News

Fasten Your Seatbelt – I’m Going to Try a New Theme… or Two

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The blog theme that I’ve been using here for some time is so old that it apparently does not support some current wordpress features that I want to use. While there might be ways to work around this situation, given enough code hacking and patience… I think I may just try moving to a more modern theme.

Over the next day or so, things may change in strange and complicated ways. I hope that any problems are temporary, and I’ll keep the current (or old, if you are reading this after the update) theme around in case I need to make a hasty retreat!

And, no, the photograph of a lake shore that shows up by default in the header is not my photo – I hope to fix that very soon!

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Mist, Trees, and Boulders – Cascade Creek

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Mist, Trees, and Boulders - Cascade Creek
Mist, Trees, and Boulders - Cascade Creek

Mist, Trees, and Boulders – Cascade Creek. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Mist and spray from spring runoff fill the air in the boulder-strewn canyon of Cascade Creek, Yosemite National Park.

Making this photograph was an “interesting” experience! I visited Cascade Creek on June 18, probably near the peak flow of the spring runoff season, and the creek was a full-blown torrent. After photographing some familiar rock formations below the bridge that crosses the creek, I decided to try a photograph from the upstream side of the bridge. In this direction, the creek is more or less half waterfall and half cascade as it plunges down a very steep and narrow section of the hillside. The whole scene was in deep shade and mist and spray filled the air.

I made a guess that a 135mm lens might give me a tight enough framing of the scene, so I briefly stepped away from the creek and the spray-filled air to switch lenses. Leaving everything else behind, I took the camera, tripod, and this single prime lens and walked to the wet side of the bridge. There was enough spray that I and my gear began to get wet pretty fast, so I worked quickly. I got everything in what I figured would be about the right position before I uncovered the lens, then quickly uncovered and finalized the composition and manually focused. I knew that I couldn’t really stay in this spray all that long so I spent a couple minutes bracketing a series of exposures as the mist surrounded me, hoping that water on the lens and in the air in front of the camera would not interfere with the shot.

The main decision was about shutter speed and with other decisions regarding aperture and so forth to follow on that. The idea was to use a slow enough shutter speed to allow the water to blur a bit, but not so slow as to turn it to formless mist. I managed to get to a 1/5 second exposure by shooting at f/20, an aperture a bit smaller than I would typically want to use, as apertures smaller than about f/16 can begin to introduce a bit too much diffraction blur. But in a shot like this one where mist is obscuring a great deal of the detail anyway, that seemed like a reasonable compromise that let me lengthen the shutter speed just a bit.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Boulders, Cascade Creek

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Boulders, Cascade Creek
Boulders, Cascade Creek

Boulders, Cascade Creek. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Granite boulders deflect the turbulent flow of Cascade Creek as it descends to the Merced River, Yosemite National Park.

This photograph is another in my continuing study of the boulders and flowing water of Yosemite’s Cascade Creek. I made this photograph fairly early in the morning on the weekend when Tioga Pass opened this year. I arrived before the scheduled 8:00 a.m. opening of Tioga Pass Road and decided that it would be more interesting and useful to photograph this subject than to wait in line so that I could be on my way over the pass at exactly the moment the road opened, especially when the morning brings shaded, diffused light to this cascade.

As I repeatedly photograph this subject, I begin to know it much more thoroughly. Partly it is a matter of understanding the seasonal and even daily ebb and flow of water and light at this place, but it is also a process of becoming very familiar with smaller details of the scene. When I first photographed here this rock outcropping was something that I occasionally worked to minimize in some compositions, but it has since come to be an interesting subject on its own. It extends into the torrent, forcing the water to flow around (and partially over, in high water) before dropping steeply to the right, running into other rocks, and making a quick and turbulent left turn before heading over another drop. Because it sits in the middle of all of this wild water, it is often covered with water and this water reflects the light of the open sky beyond the shaded confines of this narrow canyon.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
Flickr | Twitter (follow me) | Facebook (“Like” my page) | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are 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.