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

Shoreline Forest, Lower Young Lake

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Shoreline Forest, Lower Young Lake
Shoreline Forest, Lower Young Lake

Shoreline Forest, Lower Young Lake. Yosemite National Park, California. September 14, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on the shoreline forest at Lower Young Lake.

After finally managing to convince myself to get out of my warm sleeping bag and bivy sack oh-so -early on this cold, late-summer morning, I grabbed my tripod, camera, and lenses and headed down to the shoreline of this lake. (That’s right – no breakfast. My routine is generally to simply get up and start shooting. I might work for as long as a few hours before the light is no longer what I want, at which point I make my way back to my camp to fix coffee and breakfast.) Although I know this lake pretty well at this point, there are always new things to discover when I look closely, and the conditions are never the same twice. Although I’ve walked past this little bit of shoreline forest many times – the trail goes right through here – this is probably the first time I’ve photographed this spot. I’m often intrigued by backlit trees – for the long shadows, the color of light coming through leaves and branches, and the darker and mysterious quality of the trunks – and several other things also caught my attention here. There was still a bit of late-season green in the small plants down close to the ground, and I liked the obstructed view of the lake surface, the far shore, and the rocky slopes above.

This type of scene and lighting poses some challenges, the most obvious being the wide dynamic range. There are very bright specular highlights reflecting from the needles of the trees and the bright areas of the tree trunks can also be very bright. In this scene there was an additional source of “bright” where the rocks above the far shoreline were directly lit by sunlight. The trick is to not blow out all of those highlights – though a bit of “blow out” on tiny specular highlights can be OK – while still retaining some detail on the shaded side of the trees. Often I resort to exposure bracketing (making two or three different exposures to be blended in post) and, in fact, I did approach this scene that way. However, by shooting RAW and working carefully in post I was able to control the highlights and bring back some of the subtle shadow details.

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

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

Evening Light, Upper Young Lake

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Evening Light, Upper Young Lake
Evening Light, Upper Young Lake

Evening Light, Upper Young Lake. Yosemite National Park, California. September 14, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early evening light on a tree-covered rocky peninsula at Upper Young Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.

I’ve visited these lakes almost annually for a number of years, since I first visited one autumn on a long day hike from the Tuolumne Meadows area. Many people visit the lower lake on day hikes, quite a few others backpack to the area and visit all three, and climbers on their way to Mount Conness also pass through the area. My plan was to stay several days so that I could do a lot of photography in the  area. The upper lake provides a beautiful sub-alpine scene, surrounded by relatively level meadows with small hills interspersed with rocky rises and groves of trees. Because the area is open to the west there can be stunning evening light here… and that I precisely why I went to the lake on this evening.

I was camped at the lower lake, where I had photographed in the morning. After I finished up my morning photography I spent a good part of the late morning and early afternoon eating a post-shoot late breakfast, more or less hanging out, reading, doing a few camp chores, and finally having a very early dinner at about 3:00 – the plan is to eat the big meal of the day early, go off and do photography as the evening light approaches, and then return to camp after dark and have something to eat before climbing into the sleeping bag.

The route that I prefer to use to get to the upper lake is not really exactly a trail. Anticipating that I’d be returning from the upper lake via this route in near or actual darkness, as I climbed it I made sure to remember a series of landmarks that I could use to find my way back. At various junctures on the route – as I would do on any similar route – I stopped to look backwards and fix in my mind certain obvious route cues that I could follow on the way back: stay above the thicker trees, stay in the middle of the bench, cross the low rise while heading straight toward a certain distant ridge, begin the descent at the two groves of trees next to the lake, and so on. I was so focused on this that when I reached my final landmark at the upper lake I barely looked around – I arrived at the final grove and immediately turned right to walk the short distance to the lakeshore and look for compositions. At about this point I recalled that I also had planned to check out camping possibilities for a future visit, so I looked back up at the grove I had just left.

I saw a tent and two people and tripods – all of which I had completely overlooked at first, so fixated was I on my “route.” I walked back up to say “hi” when I noticed that one of the two photographers looked quite familiar. I approached and said, “You bear a striking resemblance to John Sexton” – which made a lot of sense in that he was John Sexton. (If you don’t know who he is… you should. Follow the link to his web site and perhaps do a bit of searching to find out more.) I have, of course, known of John’s wonderful photography for some time and I had most recently been to a lecture at the opening of a show of his work in Carmel earlier this summer. The other photographer was Anne Larsen.

The wilderness is always full of surprises, but meeting John and Anne in the Yosemite back-country was one of the most pleasant in recent memory. We spoke for a while until the light began to become more interesting, but at various times during the evening we again ran into one another and talked about this and that. The next morning I met them once again as we were heading back to the trail head. (I felt a bit guilty about my “tiny” 15 pound load of photography equipment – they were each carrying close to 30 pounds of film gear!)

The photograph is of a tree-covered rocky rise at the end of a narrow curving peninsula that forms a small lagoon near the outlet of the lake. My initial thought had been to photograph a small tree near the edge of the lake – one that I have photographed in the past – but John correctly pointed out that it would be in shadow at the time of best light, so I decided to focus on this subject instead.

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

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Kearsarge Pinnacles

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Kearsarge Pinnacles
Kearsarge Pinnacles

Kearsarge Pinnacles. Kings Canyon National Park, California. July 30, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late afternoon like on alpine lakes, meadows, and forest below Kearsarge Pinnacles, Kings Canyon National Park.

Kearsarge Pinnacles shares its name with (Kearsarge) lakes and a (Kearsarge) pass just to the west of the Onion Valley trailhead. This is not exactly an untraveled spot in the Sierra, given that it is merely one day in on a reasonable (by east side standards) pass and that it provides access to some very popular areas of the Kings Canyon back-country and to the John Muir Trail.

I’ve been over this pass a number of times. I’ve come in this way to start trips north over Baxter Pass and south into the upper Kern River basin and over Mt. Whitney. I exited here some years back on the ninth day of a trip that started at Bishop Pass and crossed a series of JMT high passes including (in addition to Bishop) Mather, Pinchot, and Glenn passes.

Here late afternoon light, filtered by clouds, illuminates the granite benches and scattered trees above a couple of the upper lakes in the basin. Despite the obvious impressive beauty of this location, I find that it presents some photographic challenges, at least when I try to photograph “grand views” of the area and the surrounding landscape. One of them, at least in my experience, is that the light angles can be a bit tricky. For example, as the sun sets it isn’t quite far enough north to light up the slopes of the pinnacles, and some of the interesting foreground subjects go into shadow as the light warms up. On this evening I made one of those timing discoveries that I’ll have to remember and apply the next time I’m there – from about the location of this photograph there was a minute or two of very interesting light right on the upper edges of the closer ridges… which I wasn’t quite quick enough to capture!

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

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Sunset, Unnamed Lake and Great Western Divide

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Sunset, Unnamed Lake and Great Western Divide
Sunset, Unnamed Lake and Great Western Divide

Sunset, Unnamed Lake and Great Western Divide. Sequoia National Park, California. August 2, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A boulder sits in the still water of an unnamed sub-alpine lake in the Upper Kern River Basin as the sunset light streams over the Great Western Divide.

This photograph comes from a week-long pack trip with a group of friends into the southern Sierra Nevada, this year’s installment of our ongoing annual back-country trips. After crossing over 11,760′ Kearsarge Pass and then 13, 200′ Forester Pass we entered one of my favorite parts of the Sierra back-country, the high plateaus of the upper Kern River basin. This area is surrounded by peaks rising as high as 14,000’+ in almost all directions and the view is expansive because much of the area is a very high plateau with nearly level areas at and above 12,000′.

I have been in this general part of the Sierra many times, going all the way back to my college days when I came over Forester Pass for the first time. On this year’s trip we followed the usual John Muir Trail route down to Tyndall Creek and camped there on day 3. From here we decided to spend the next couple of days exploring a little-visited area to the west where the Kern River has its source and just below the impressive peaks of the Great Western Divide. The lake in this photograph is one of several beautiful but unnamed small lakes in the area in which we camped. Peaks of the Great Western Divide are beyond as sunset light streams between them.

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

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