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

Sheep Peak, McCabe Lakes Basin, Sunset

October 1, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The last light of the day touches the top of Sheep Peak in the McCabe Lakes Basin, Yosemite National Park.

This was a beautiful and fun evening! We were camped at the lower lake in this basin for a few days. The routine, roughly speaking goes something like this: Up before dawn and off to photograph some morning subject until the light goes or the energy wears down; back to camp for breakfast; do camp chores and generally hang out and shoot the breeze into the afternoon; dinner sometime around 3:00 or 4:00; then off to whatever locations is on the agenda for the evening shoot; back to camp after dark. On this evening we all were on the same page and we all headed up to this lake, a few hundred feet higher and no more than a mile from our camp.

The walk was steep but mostly pleasant, at least as long as one went relatively slowly and stayed out of the creek with its willow thickets and instead found a route through the forest nearby. Eventually the route – there is no trail – began to level out at a meadowy area below the lake. This was gave a false sense that the climb was over, but at least the walk up the meadow was very enjoyable, as the small outlet stream twisted through grassy meadow and past the occasional boulder and some trees, with the higher peaks visible above. At the upper end of this meadow was the lake’s basin, with a tall peak on top of the headwall at the upper end, forest beyond the shoreline meadows to the left, and rugged talus slopes and rocky peaks along the right shoreline.

Here we split up and looked for our own shots. As I sometimes do, I found “the spot” and more or less worked it until the light went away. I walked along the thin shoreline meadow, resisting the temptation to just set up and start shooting, and eventually came to this little group of shoreline rocks and trees that I could use as the close element of photographs of the lake and the peaks beyond as the day came to an end.

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

Trees and Granite Cliffs, Evening Light

September 30, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Evening sun backlights trees ascending granite slopes in front of cliffs, Yosemite National Park.

This is very similar to a photograph I posted very soon after returning from this trip about a week ago – the previous one was a portrait orientation variation on this landscape orientation version. The beautiful conjunction of trees, granite, and evening light occurred along the Tuolumne River in an area not far from where the river leaves is wide and relatively flat and peaceful path through sub-alpine meadows and enters a canyon that gradually becomes steeper and deeper as it leads to the unfortunate obscenity of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. (I visited that location this summer for the first time in many year, and I found it to be the saddest place that I can ever recall visiting in the National Park System.)

But to leave that gloom and doom behind, this portion of the Tuolumne is spectacularly beautiful! Here the river begins to flow quickly and sometimes wildly across granite slabs, sometimes pausing to flow serenely in more level sections. As I was photographing other more intimate subjects above the river I happened to look up and see this beautiful late afternoon back-light shining through the trees that climbed up towards these folded granite ridges, with the haze-obscured vertical cliffs beyond.

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

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

September 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A tree and granite slab are lit by brilliant sunset light from a dissipating evening thunderstorm, Yosemite National Park.

This was another of those sometimes-surprising bursts of evening Sierra color that results in effects so gaudy that they almost seem unreal – but this is real. I was camped down in a valley among trees so I wasn’t initially expecting much in the way of spectacular sunset photography. Instead, I planned to take advantage of the early shadows in the valley and get some evening photographs under soft light without any direct sun at all. I first worked some moving water where the nearby river flowed across granite slabs, and then I contemplated photographing some small plants in deeply cracked and patterned granite. As a worked my way across this granite, I remembered a small tree on the other side of the bowl that had looked like an interested photo subject a few days ago, so I walked over to that area where the tree stands in a shallow granite bowl.

Earlier in the afternoon I could see huge thunderheads building up to my east, but they did not move far enough west to affect me with anything more than a bit of gray sky. However, as the clouds built up to higher elevations, their tops began to take on the familiar “anvil” shape and the upper portions of the “anvils” began to spread to the west and out over my position. This is a classic setup for potentially spectacular evening sky color. Near sunset the clouds can pick up intense red/orange coloration from the sun setting in the west. At the same time, the storms begin to dissipate, creating semi-transparent “curtains” of virga (falling rain that doesn’t reach the ground), unusual shapes along the bottoms of the clouds, clouds emerging out of the gray murk as the sunset light picks them up.

As I arrived at my little tree, I quickly lost interest in that subject as the cloud light show began. First the bottom of the thunderhead began to turn brilliantly orange and red. Then the lower reaches of the small storm began to produce very unusual cloud shapes including mammatus clouds. Virga produced a brightly colored by semi-transparent scrim. It quickly became so bright that the red/orange colors began to wash the granite bowl, and I turned my camera from the little tree to the uphill granite surfaces and the clouds above.

In this vertical format image the tip of a small tree extends above the top of a dome-like area above me, and the brilliant light from the clouds washes the dome with color. The colors here have not been “amped up” in post – in fact, I’ve actually toned some of them down a bit!

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

Small Trees and Plants, Granite Slabs

September 25, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Small trees and plants grow in a thin crack among stained granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

Just over a small hill from the campsite on the first nights of my recent Yosemite back-country photography trip, the Tuolumne River cuts down through rocky terrain and past large granite slabs marked by intrusions of red rock. As is often the case in the Sierra, any tiny crack or weakness in the rock is enough for plants to get started. This very think crack supports a “grove” of very small trees, along with some other plants.

The previous week had been a rainy one, including the night before, when I arrived just in time to set up my tent before the rain began. As a result, water had been draining across this granite slope and highlighting the natural seepage lines on the rock and the colors of various deposits from the more colorful rock above and embedded in the granite slabs. I made this photograph in the very soft early morning light before the sun had risen high enough to send direct light down into the canyon.

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