News

Winter arrives in the Sierra?

October 12, 2009 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

A few years ago I did what was a traditional end-of-season backpack trip out of Tuolumne Meadows on the last weekend during which the NPS permits overnight parking on Tioga Pass road – this is typically on or just before October 15. It was a beautiful weekend with – as I always hope for in October – pleasant, sunny conditions and beautiful light.

The following weekend a backpacking buddy who had been unable to make that trip tried his own end-of-seasons visit, hoping to wander up into the Twenty Lakes Basin area just east of Tioga Pass. He arrived late and rolled out his bivy sack at the small campground by the lake right below Tioga Pass… and woke up the next morning with more than a half foot of snow on top of him and more on the way. He scrambled out of his bag, got into his car, and managed to get out just before the road was blocked. He liked to say that he was there for the switch from fall to winter… literally.

It sounds like something similar may happen over the next 24 hours. From all reports, one of the biggest October storms that we’ve seen in California in decades may be sweeping through tonight and tomorrow, bringing heavy winds, a lot of rain, and the potential for some significant snow at the higher elevations.

The folks at the Dweeb Report (interesting source of Sierra weather info) include an ominous sentence in their most recent update: “WINDS WITH THIS SYSTEM OVER THE CREST COULD REACH BETWEEN 120MPH AND 140MPH OVER THE CENTRAL SIERRA.”

Of course, you knew this was leading to a comment on aspens, right? Given the rather strange conditions for aspen color this fall, somehow it doesn’t seem at all surprising that the storm might bring down a good portion of the remaining leaves!

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Shoreline Trees in Morning Light, Upper Cathedral Lake

October 12, 2009 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Morning light illuminates a row of shoreline trees and autumn meadow with granite slopes beyond at Upper Cathedral Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.

During the final weekend of September I briefly joined five other photographers (and a painter) at Upper Cathedral Lake in the Yosemite National Park back-country near Tuolumne Meadows. (The rest of this group was there for a full week, and I only joined them for two days.)

For a location so close to “civilization” (the trailhead in Tuolumne Meadows is only 3.5 miles away) the Cathedral Lakes area provides an astonishing wealth of photographic subjects. There are two lakes, and the pointed summit of Cathedral Peak looms nearby. But beyond that the lakes are surrounded by huge masses of glaciated granite slabs, domes, and peaks. There are beautiful meadows and surrounding forest. A short climb away are the alpine peaks of the Cathedral Range.

While the other photographers ventured further from the base camp at Upper Cathedral, I chose to work closer to camp. On the first evening I wandered up a nearby rocky gully, shooting fall foliage and granite formations. I eventually topped out and climbed out onto the smooth dome-like glaciated surface overlooking the upper lake and with a clear view of Cathedral Peak. Very early the next morning I was up and starting a 3 hour circumnavigation of this small lake, photographing the water, the shoreline rocks, the meadows, the surrounding peaks, and in this photo the forest and groves of trees than surround the lake.

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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Technique

Reader question: How to add borders to online photographs

October 11, 2009 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

From time to time people ask what techniques I use to create the simple frames for versions of my photographs that I post online. A while ago I wrote about this: Creating Frames for Online Photos: My Method. The explanation involves the use of Photoshop CS3, but the technique is essentially the same in the current version of the program.

You can read the details at the link above, but the process is basically fairly straightforward. I use Image –> Canvas size to add a series of borders to the original image: a one-pixel gray border immediately around it, a larger white border beyond that with a bit more width at the bottom, and finally a one-pixel black border at the outer edge. I turn this into an action that I can apply by selecting it and clicking a button to run it.

The approach to creating the text incorporated into the web images is similar, though it requires a bit of tweaking with each photograph. Essentially, I create three text layers: one for the large type at the bottom, one for the small embedded copyright notice, and a slightly larger “watermark” that will go over the image itself. The action I recorded creates the three layers and inserts the boilerplate text, but I always have to do a bit of alignment manually, and I may also have to make some decisions about opacity and so on depending upon the characteristics of the individual image. Still, it takes less than a minute to do the whole thing even in the wost cases.

Why apply a border, “branding” text, and copyright to the photographs?

If people like your photograph, it makes sense to make it easy for them to find you – so I include the easily readable text with my name and web site URL. No matter where the unaltered file ends up, viewers will be able to find the source.
The use of consistent presentation helps to establish the photographer’s “brand.” This is true even when the image is displayed in ways that are out of your control, including search engine results.
Inclusion of the copyright information is a formality to remind viewers that use of my photographs requires advance permission.
Although the inclusion of a watermark cannot stop a dedicated image thief, I think it reduces the likelihood of misappropriation – and that is probably about all that one can really hope for on the basis of a watermark. It may tweak the conscience of the typical user, who may perhaps simply not have thought about the issues of legal usage, and it may encourage others to look for a different image that won’t expose their illegal use and/or require them to take the intentional step of trying to remove the text to cover up the source.

I also addressed these issues in a separate post at this blog.

(Occasionally a person interested in purchasing a print or licensing a photograph for some other use wonders if the embedded watermarks, copyright information, and branded borders are part of the original images. No. When you purchase a print there is nothing on the paper but the photograph itself and my signature. Photos licensed for other uses – books, magazines, web site, etc – are normally provided without added text.)

Articles in the “reader questions” series:

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

Aspen Leaves in Transition – Near Conway Summit

October 11, 2009 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Aspen leaves in transition from green to fall hues in the shade of a grove above Conway Summit, Sierra Nevada, California.

This is another of my close-up aspen detail photographs from my one-hour or so shoot in the eastern Sierra near Conway Summit on the last Sunday of September. I took a quick detour to this part of the “east side” after completing a short photographic backpack trip to Cathedral Lakes that weekend.

I’ve photographed this grove before, so I stop every season and see what I can find. This time I think I arrived a few days earlier than usual in the color transition. There were still a lot more leaves on trees in the grove than I’ve seen in the past and a nearby grove was still completely green. (This grove is among the first you encounter as you drive up the road from Highway 395/Conway Summit toward Virginia Lake, right by a dirt road turnoff on the left side.)

As I walked into the lower edge of the grove, I discovered that among leaves that were for the most part either green or yellow, there were a few here that had a wider range of colors – some residual green, yellow, gold, orange, and even verging on red. So, in addition to shooting the larger view of the grove, I decided to use a long lens and work on a few close shots of the leaves that most caught my attention.

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.