El Capitan Meadow, Autumn. Yosemite Valley, California. November 2, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Photograph of El Capitan Meadow in autumn with plants and trees in fall colors.

I wish I knew the identity of the leafy plants carpeting this section of the meadow under the oak trees (hint, hint… :-), but every year I’m attracted to the splash of red color they provide beneath these oak trees in the meadow near the base of El Capitan. During my otherwise very rainy early November visit to the Valley, there was a bit of brief clearing as I stopped to photograph this scene. (Actually, that was true this time – I had stopped here earlier during the weekend, contemplated carting my camera equipment into the meadow during the rain, and simply stayed in the car.)

Update: Some people asked about the equipment used for this photograph. It was photographed with a Canon 5D full frame DSLR using the excellent ultra wide EF 17-40mm zoom at the wide end of its range. A small aperture helped produce relatively deep depth of field. One complexity in this photograph was the extreme dynamic range between the shadows among the foreground plants and the sunlit clouds above. Two exposures were combined to deal with this, one exposed for the sky and the other for the shaded areas.

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