Tag Archives: basin

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

Evening Thunderstorm Above Shepherd’s Crest

September 27, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Evening thunderstorms tower beyond the ridge of Shepherd’s Crest in Yosemite National Park.

There is a bit of a serendipitous story behind this photograph. We were camped at a high lake in the Yosemite backcountry for several days. On the first day the weather was that typical Sierra blue sky weather that can sometimes go on for weeks – beautiful if you live benign weather, but perhaps less appealing to photographers. On the second day, a few small clouds appeared around noon and by evening were becoming quite nice looking above the higher peaks, so we walked up to a higher lake in the evening and did some photography there. On the third day, the little precursor clouds began to show up a bit earlier – perhaps by 11:00 a.m. or even a bit earlier. This tends to get your attention if you have spent time in the Sierra, since clouds that appear that early may have time to develop into full-fledged thunderstorms.

On the second night, one member of our party had visited another little like above our base camp and reported back that it had photo potential. Others decided to visit it early in the morning on day three, though I photographed elsewhere at that time. But when I saw these clouds I thought it might be interesting to get up to this “other little lake” in the evening. Since the route is cross-country I got directions from another member of the group – basically “head up the rocky area, keeping to the right of the bunch of willows in the creek bed, and then head up to the lake. Two members of the group, Charlie and Keith, headed up before me and I followed perhaps 15-20 minutes later.

The climb was enjoyable – while it was steep, the views just got better and better. I ascended the obvious route up the “rocky area,” saw the willows ahead, passed them on my left, and continued on. I soon realized that this was a mistake since instead of a passable route up the lake I encountered a steep rocky wall. Apparently I missed something in the instructions. I probed around a bit and finally found a reasonably safe route up some ledges, carefully marking my return route with rock duck cairns as I ascended, and finally emerged at the top of the steep section… way up the canyon from the likely location of the lake. It was spectacular, but it wasn’t the lake and Charlie and Keith were nowhere to be found.

When traveling alone I tend to be rather conservative and cautious, so I had set a turn-around time that I knew would get me back to camp before complete darkness. That time now arrived, so I back down the little system of ledges, made a few photographs of beautiful high meadows right below them, and started back down toward camp, leaving enough time to stop to make photographs on the descent.

As I passed back down below the rocky wall, the view opened up in front of me and to my right, and included within this panorama was the full length of Shepherd’s crest, with a huge thunderhead and plenty of virga just beyond the ridge. This photograph was made a few minutes before actual sunset when the angle of the light was quite low and the sunset colors were just beginning to glow.

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

Greenstone Lake, Morning

August 18, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early morning light on Greenstone Lake and surrounding trees and rocky terrain.

Greenstone is a relatively small lake just beyond the upper end of Saddlebag Lake, which is itself located just east of the Sierra crest and Yosemite National Park in an area dominated by Mount Conness and the tall ridge on which it stands. I had arrived before dawn at the Saddlebag Lake parking lot so that I could be on the trail before sunrise. Rather than giving in to the temptation to pay for a “water taxi” ride to the other end of the lake, I took the trail along the left shore, and arrived at Greenstone Lake just about the time that the first direct light was making its way down to this lake and the surrounding rocky hillside.

In this wet year with its late arrival of summer conditions, everything was still very wet around the lake and the meadow plants were still green and growing. (In dry years they start to finish up their growth spurt and begin turning brown by this time.)

I think this lake is a bit tricky to photograph in morning light. The light could be lovely at sunrise, but it would still be well up on the high ridges above the lake. It takes a long time for the sun to get high enough to rise above the ridge leading to Tioga Peak, and by that time most of the early morning warm light quality has given way to more typical daytime light. There were a few challenges in this photograph. They included trying to figure out how to find a workable composition in such a complex scene that was made even more complex by the reflections in the water. I think the triangle of rocky terrain in the upper half of the frame may help with this. The light posed several problems, mainly related to the very large dynamic range between the bright rocks and the shaded areas of forest at upper right. The light color was also tricky – because the shadows tend to be much bluer in a photograph than your eyes register when you are there, I had to mute the very blue quality of the shadows. This was done partly with an overall adjustment to color, but some additional work had to be done directly on the shadows.

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Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Parking Lot Near Pier 48, Morning

July 15, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Morning light on a large parking lot near Pier 48, San Francisco.

Continuing with the “urban landscape” theme, this is a photograph of a parking lot south of the bridge next to ATT Park and near the buildings of Pier 48 in San Francisco. After getting off the train that arrived in San Francisco at 7:00 a.m. and wandering over to Townsend Street, I decided to cross the what I think must be the Mission Bay inlet and take a look through this area which was rather deserted at this early hour. (Come back here before a Giants game, and the parking lot will be completely full of the cars of people who are willing to spend exorbitant amounts to park here.)

While there were cars in other portions of this parking lot that are closer to likely destinations, at this far end there was a single lonely car, and that seemed like it could be an anchor for a photograph of the lot, the tall streetlight poles, the industrial-looking buildings of Pier 48 and other assorted waterfront things. Because it was so early, the sun rising across the bay was filling the air with brilliant light that created a sky that was more white than blue.

In addition to the obvious crop, this image required other kinds of substantial work in post. The first issue was controlling the very brightest parts of the sky and a second was the follow-up need to then lighten a few other areas to get some detail back into the image. Color balance was a tricky thing – this isn’t that far from what the raw file contained, though I did warm the colors just a bit. I also did something in this image that I rarely do, namely use semi-opaque blurred and desaturated overlay layer of the original image to do, well, some stuff that is a bit hard to describe in written form. Suffice it to say that this had an effect on the parking lot and on the brightness of the sky.

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