Tag Archives: alpenglow

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Alpenglow, Trees, and Granite – Upper Young Lake

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Alpenglow, Trees, and Granite - Upper Young Lake
Alpenglow, Trees, and Granite - Upper Young Lake

Alpenglow, Trees, and Granite – Upper Young Lake. Yosemite National Park, California. September 14, 2010. © Copyright 2010 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Alpenglow light on trees growing among granite boulders below glacially carved cliffs at Upper Young Lake.

This is one of my favorite locations in the Yosemite back-country and, in fact, in the entire Sierra Nevada range. This beautiful sub-alpine basis contains three lovely lakes and is surrounded by varied terrain that includes distant views, peaks and ridges towering above, lodgepole pine forests, meadows small and large, and an open view to the west that often provides stunning light late in the day.

As is usually the case, I was camped at the lower Young Lake – this time for several days of photography – and I had headed to the upper lake late in the day to do some evening photography. I have photographed there quite a few times, but I still haven’t come close to exhausting the photographic potential of the place. On this evening I knew that I wanted to be ready to photograph the golden hour light, but I was also interested in the smaller groups of trees that grow among the granite boulders and I wanted to see what might develop as alpenglow struck the glacial slopes above the lake.

There is a small, fun twist to the story of this visit to Upper Young Lake. I took a semi-cross-country route to the upper lake from my camp at the lower lake, and because I knew that I’d be returning alone in deep twilight or even after dark, on the hike up I was concentrating intensely on fixing a series of landmarks in my mind for the return hike. I was so single-minded about this that I made it all the way to the lake and my first intended subject (a small shoreline tree) without looking around much. It was only a moment after arriving that I got out of focus-on-the-route mode and looked around. I had walked right past the campsite of a couple of photographers without even seeing them, much less saying “hi.” Turns out that the photographers were John Sexton and Anne Larsen. After exchanging greetings and conversation, I went about my business of shooting along the edge of the lake. (If I recall correctly, John was shooting nearby as I made this exposure.)

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Last Light, Mount Conness

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Last Light, Mount Conness
Last Light, Mount Conness

Last Light, Mount Conness. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The final evening alpenglow illuminates the summit ridge of Mount Conness and the west face of Medlicott Dome in the Yosemite National Park high country.

This will be my final photograph of Mount Conness from the evening of June 18, the day that Tioga Pass Road opened this year and the day of one of the most spectacular Yosemite high country sunsets in recent memory. It will be the final both in the sense that I think I’ve now shared the best of the group of images of this sunset and in the sense that it was literally my final exposure of the evening.

The short back-story is that what started out as a fairly unimpressive evening (at least in the photographic sense) transformed over a short period into something extraordinary as the sun dropped to the horizon west of the Sierra and illuminated the clouds from below, creating rare and very special alpenglow conditions over a wide area of the Sierra. (During the week that followed quite a few people commented on this amazing light, which they had witnessed from locations as distant as Mono Lake on the east side and the Central Valley to the west.)

When I made this photograph the show was coming to an end. At this point the sun had already set a few minutes earlier – the exposure was made around 8:45 p.m. – and the light was low enough to require a six-second exposure. While it may seem like Mount Conness (the tallest peak near the left on the skyline) and other features are receiving direct sunlight, this is actually the remaining post-sunset glow in the western sky.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness

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Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness
Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness

Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Clouds lit by alpenglow drift across the face of Mount Conness beyond the Tenaya Creek drainage, Yosemite National Park.

Earlier this week I posted another photograph of the same evening. This one was shot a bit earlier (believe it or not!) than the other photograph, as the intense and perhaps unexpected color display was just getting started. I’ll have more to write about the phenomenon in a future blog post that uses this evening as an example, but it almost seem like the sunset progressed backwards (oxymoron alert!) as it went on. It had begun with very boring and low contrast light, somewhat flattened by a haze that took on an increasingly ghastly blue-green hue as the light began to fade. Although the surroundings were spectacular on this opening day of Tioga Pass Road, the light and atmospheric conditions seemed to be conspiring to show them it their worst (literal and figurative) light.

But just at dusk a hint of pink appeared in some of the clouds ringing Mount Conness, the tall peak in the upper left. At first it was so faint that only those of us who were looking for it might have noticed, and we perhaps thought that we were simply trying to convince ourselves that something was going to happen. But the color increased, and as the more distant areas picked up better light, they shone through the foreground haze more clearly, and this haze faded in the same way that a scrim does in a theater when the front lights dim and the stage lights rise.

I find that this type of scene provides some of the most difficult technical and judgment challenges. So often the goal in an image, especially if it is going to be a print, is to try to get as much light into the scene as possible. A lot of the work in post-processing, at least for me, is done with the goal of trying to fill the image with light by means of various careful adjustments, often involving the use of masked curve layers. But here, the coloration depends upon not being overly bright – too much light either decreases the intensity of the pink and purple shadings or else sends them off into the land of the grotesque and gaudy. And the light in shadows – and there are a lot of shaded areas in this scene! – is very blue, much more so than the untrained eye would imagine when looking at the scene in person. This requires another set of tricky and subjective judgments – it would not look right to leave portions of the scene as blue “as they really were,” nor would it look right if the blue were diminished too much. But how much is right? There is no objective answer that I know of, so the goal (for example, on the large granite face of Polly Dome at the left) is to come up with a balance that seems blue enough but not too blue. A similar issue arises in these dark areas when it comes to deciding how bright is bright enough. Believe it or not, virtually nothing in this image is actually black, with the possible exception of a few very tiny areas in the lower left. The luminosity of the very dark areas had to be lifted a bit… but how much is just right? Again, a matter of personal judgment about which there is no objectively right answer.

All of that technical stuff aside, this evening provided one of the most glorious, albeit brief, displays of sublime light I have seen in the Sierra.

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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

Alpenglow, Mount Conness

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Alpenglow, Mount Conness
Alpenglow, Mount Conness

Alpenglow, Mount Conness. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last evening light illuminates domes near Tenaya Lake and the summit of Mount Conness with briilliantly colorful alpenglow, Yosemite National Park.

The tall peak at upper left is the summit of Mount Conness, one of the highest peaks in Yosemite National Park. The peak is located on the park boundary and the Sierra Nevada crest a bit north of Tioga Pass, and is visible from many places in the Tuolumne/Tioga high country. It is also a popular destination for peak baggers. The left foreground granite dome is the lower face of Polly Dome, which drops to the shoreline of Tenaya Lake. The left slope of Pywiak dome is visible in the shadows at lower right and beyond is the more brightly illuminated Medlicott dome.

I forgive you if you don’t believe the colors that you see in this photograph. I barely believe them myself, and I was (obviously!) there for the show. What happened on this evening was a near perfect example of a light phenomenon that Sierra photographers watch for and are occasionally lucky enough to experience. I have learned to see the signs that indicate that this light is possible, but also to understand that even when the conditions offer this potential that they rarely deliver.

On certain cloudy evenings in the Sierra it appears that there will be no sunset color – everything is hazy and drab and washed out. But if things play out just right, this very set of drab conditions (that induce some photographers to put away their gear too soon!) can produce some of the most striking and intense color possible if a few things fall into place just right. On this evening I had stopped for a moment at Olmsted Point, thinking to photograph ice-covered Tenaya Lake with a long lens and including the mass of Mount Conness in the distance. When I arrived there, things were about as unpromising as they could possibly be. A dull, greenish-blue haze hung in the air, overcast washed out the light, and Conness was obscured by clouds. I had actually put my gear back in the car when I looked back up and noticed that the summit of Conness had briefly poked through the clouds, accentuating its bulk and the sense that it towered over the foreground mountains. The light was still awful (I have the photos to prove it! ;-) but I thought I’d see if I could get something with the peak emerging from its shroud.

But still nothing much happened. I turned the camera to photograph some nearby trees and a blackbird that was looking for snacks. Then I noticed that there was some brighter light to the southwest and I began to consider the possibility that the cloud cover might end a bit to the west – and that is requirement #1 for the light conditions I’m describing. If the cloud deck ends to the west, as the sun reaches the horizon it may briefly break under the clouds and send brilliantly colorful light up into the clouds in the Sierra from below, creating a miles-wide light panel of the most astonishing colors. But still, it was hazy and the peaks were shrouded in clouds. But then I noticed that the clouds around Conness were beginning to drift off to the east and thin a bit. I mentioned (knock on wood!) to one of the other photographers that there was a possibility of “miracle light,” but that I wasn’t making any promises!

Then the thinning clouds began to pick up a slight pink tinge and the left side of Conness began to get some light directly from the west. Then, within a minute or so, the colors went absolutely crazy. People around me were audibly gasping as the color changed. At one point several of us spontaneously looked up to the west when we noticed the light suddenly increase out of the corners of our eyes. At the same time, the clouds almost completely dissipated from the area around the peak and because the whole sky was filled with brilliantly colorful clouds, this light began to suffuse even the depths of the canyon and slopes facing away from the sunset with this amazing light.

Never put your camera away until the last light is gone. :-)

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.