Tag Archives: beam

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

Last Light on Snow, Fog, and Granite

March 7, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trees, fog, and snow on the granite summit of El Capitan glow in a final beam of sunset light.

Near the beginning of March I was in Yosemite Valley for three days in conjunction with the opening of the Yosemite Renaissance XXIX exhibit. (One of my photographs is in the show.) It was a wonderful weekend in many ways. Lots of artists of all sorts were there for the opening—and for Yosemite!—and I had the chance to get together with many friends among them. It was also a time of atmospheric conditions that were spectacular in ways that interest me as a photographer – broken light, occasional rain, mist and clouds.

On this evening we went to Tunnel View since it was mostly gray down in the Valley and because there was some promise of not only drifting clouds and mist there, but also of some late day light. All of those things happened, but as the end of the day approached, the “lights went out” as the clouds to the west thickened and blocked the setting sun. I continued to shoot for a while, mostly focusing a long lens on small distant details within the scene, but I finally decided that the light was simply becoming too flat and I walked back to the car to pack up, thinking about the friends I would soon join for dinner in the Valley. At the back of the car I removed the long lens, collapsed the tripod, and was packing everything away when Patty, who was sitting the front seat and facing the valley, exclaimed, “Look at that light!” Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much, but when I looked up I saw a blood red band of light stretching across the cliffs of El Capitan on the left and Sentinel Rocks on the right. Apparently the sun had found a narrow gap in the clouds almost exactly at the point it reached the horizon far to the west. I immediately knew that this light would be gone very quickly—at best it might last a minute or two—so I worked very quickly to set up the tripod, attach the camera, and stick a long lens on it… not even looking up at the view as I worked. No time to look! I quickly moved the camera to the nearest possible shooting location and, working almost entirely intuitively, quickly picked out perhaps four different shots, each focusing on the momentarily best bit of light as the scene evolved quickly. The final bit of light was a rapidly fading stripe just across the snow- and cloud-shrouded summit of El Capitan, where the upper rocks, snow, and trees picked up the intense red light for a matter of a few seconds, and then it was gone.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Outcropping, White Mountains, Morning

October 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The White Mountains with new snow and morning clouds tower above a spire in the Buttermilks above Bishop, California

In early October, my excuse for going – yet again – to the eastern Sierra was, of course, to shoot the beautiful fall color of the aspen trees. That is reason enough to head over there, and I go every fall. And I did photograph aspens while I was over there. But my little secret is that there is a lot more than aspens to photograph on the East Side in the fall, and while aspens were always on my mind, photographing them took up less than half of our time overall.

The first day of the visit was devoted largely to travel, and the travel took longer than usual because a fall snow storm was passing through, closing passes so that we had to cross the Sierra much further north than usual, and then slowing the drive down highway 395. (The slow drive was partially due to road conditions, but perhaps more due to interesting photographic conditions that led to a lot of side trips and stops along the way.) On the second morning I knew that there would be a layer of fresh snow on the east facing slopes of the crest above Owens Valley, so we drove up into the Buttermilk area above Bishop to photograph there at dawn. After finishing up there we headed back down to pick up the road up into the Bishop Creek drainage. As we drove I saw some of the interesting pinnacles of the Buttermilks catching the morning sun as the huge ridge of the White Mountains, also covered with new snow, towered over on the other side of Owens Valley.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Evening Shadows, Alpine Lake

September 26, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening shadows fall across an island-studded alpine lake and surrounding cliffs as the sun drops behind a nearby ridge

This lake is one of many located close to the spot where four of us spent six mid-September nights camping near 11,000′ of elevation near the spine of the Sierra in Kings Canyon National Park. We remained in one base camp location, and each day we explored more of the surrounding terrain of lakes, granite, meadows, vast bowls, ridges, and surrounding peaks. While the backpacker’s imperative is often to keep moving in order to see a lot of country, ours was to stay in one area and spend time getting to know it better. Our subjects were literally outside the doors of our tents, and we were up before dawn every morning and we didn’t return from shooting until dark.

I photographed this lake and its surroundings on multiple occasions, ranging from early morning on sunny days to dusk on a day when I shot in light rain. The appearance and mood of such a place is transformed significantly according to the light at various times of day and in response to the weather. One constant in this particular location was that large areas were often in shadow in the very early and very late hours, as steep slopes and high ridges stood between the landscape and the sun in many places. The light in this photograph is illustrative. Perhaps only minutes earlier, the final direct sun of the day had come across a high ridge to the right of my camera position and washed warm light across the water, the rocky islands and shore line, and the broken granite cliffs. But here, all that remains of the light is an intense beam of light angling down from right to left beyond the main cliff and casting only a bit of direct light on its edge. Below, light in the bowl holding the lake has turned cold and blue – a change that literally took only moments. While I think we tend to first think of that earlier, warmer light, this cold shaded light is an intrinsic element of these high places and the feeling of that light is what I wanted to capture in this photograph.

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

Dome and Meadow Trees

September 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Beams of sunset light, shining through breaks in clouds, momentarily illuminate Tuolumne Meadows trees and the granite slopes of Lembert Dome

This is a sort of companion photograph to one I posted earlier that was taken at about the same time, but more tightly composed and focusing on just the shoulder of Lembert Dome and the slopes of Mount Dana beyond. This was one of those Sierra evenings that started out with very mediocre light, but which also held the potential for something special to happen if things were to play out just the right way. Due to a wildfire over the crest near Mammoth Lakes, the sky was quite hazy. A high layer of clouds added to the gloom. I had spent the early evening trying to find some way to photograph these conditions, but was coming up short.

Not too long before I made this photograph, I had seen the gray murk suddenly lit by the warm glow of light coming underneath the edge of the high clouds far to the west as the sun dropped toward the horizon. This is not an uncommon event when the conditions line up correctly in the high Sierra, but this time it was a bit different due to the haze. The light, which might otherwise have been so colorful and bright as to almost be beyond belief, was instead muted and softened, though no less warm. A few minutes before I shot this image, the scene had been quite different – the sun had been behind those high clouds. But as I watched this it looked to me like the sun might find its way through a gap in the clouds, so I was ready to swing my camera to the east and capture Lembert Dome and other features in this light. Here that warm evening light glances across the face of the dome and softly lights some trees at the edge of the forest around Tuolumne Meadows.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: beam

Outcropping, White Mountains, Morning

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Dome and Meadow Trees

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.