Tag Archives: cliff

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

Forest and Cliffs, Autumn

November 24, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Soft autumn light on Yosemite Valley forests and granite cliffs.

A typical day of shooting in normal weather in a place like Yosemite Valley starts early – though perhaps not as early as in some other locations, since the first light is somewhat muted by the tall cliffs and taller peaks to the east. I select subjects largely based on what the light is like and where I think it will be interesting, often focusing on places where I can get nice backlight, soft light in shadows, or perhaps atmospheric conditions such as fog. I may move around the Valley, shooting in one spot for a while and then moving on to another place where I suspect that conditions might be interesting. Depending upon the conditions and the season, this can go on for hours in the morning until eventually the light becomes “midday blah” and I’m exhausted and hungry! Time for a (very late) breakfast break and a pause in the photography on most days. After coffee and food I’ll usually take care of some business, for example breaking camp if it my final day there, and I’ll often wander around to visit familiar places – perhaps a gallery or a museum – and then it is probably time for a short nap. (Keep in mind that I’ve been up since well before dawn, and will likely shoot until dark and then possibly drive for four hours or more!)

At some point in the mid to early afternoon it feels like time to photograph some more – the angle of the light becomes less and backlight opportunities increase, afternoon haze may be increasing the sense of depth in the landscape, and I need to begin figuring where I’ll want to be at various times during the evolution of the light that will continue until after sunset. On this afternoon I went back into photography mode at about 2:30 or so, and this photograph was made at the “early” hour of around 3:00. But because it was fall, the sun angle was already low enough to backlight and highlight the cottonwood trees at the edge of the meadow and the textures and shapes of the granite cliffs rising above the Valley.

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

Tall Trees, Meadow, Autumn

November 22, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Tall trees grow in a row in a meadow backed by cottonwood and black oak trees with autumn foliage

I guess I just can’t help myself when it comes to photographing in this Yosemite Valley meadow area – or in similar areas, for that matter. As I’ve written before, during the time of the year when the days are shorter and the sun is lower, the light in some of these places is constantly changing – pre-sunrise and post-sunset soft “blue hour” light, early and late direct sun over the upper edges of cliffs, shadow right after dawn and before sunset and when cliffs interrupt the light during midday hours. Other changes take place on a longer cycle – the stark quality of winter, snow covering everything when winter storms arrive, morning fog, trees newly green in spring or yellow and gold in fall. And there are many more things to see than just the “landscape size” things – wildflowers, fallen leaves, frost, and more.

So, yes, I visited and revisited the meadows during this fall’s end-of-October visit to The Valley. While I often focus on the black oaks that grow in these meadows, here I decided to focus on evergreen trees. This group stands almost evenly spaced in a row. I struggled with how to deal with their height when shooting from a relatively close distance, and then realized that by not including the whole tree I could emphasize the vertical lines of their trunks and perhaps suggest the even higher parts of the trees that are not visible here.

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

Meadow, Trees, Granite Wall

November 20, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The immense granite face of Cathedral Rocks looms behind trees of El Capitan Meadow in autumn afternoon light

This meadow, located between two of the largest cliffs in Yosemite Valley, is both an obvious place to make photographs – everyone does it – and a place of nearly infinite variations of light, season, and atmosphere. Sometimes when I’m in the Valley I may stop here two or three times during the day. As is the case in other spots in Yosemite Valley, the place changes radically depending upon what the light is doing – soft early morning or evening light, strong light coming down the Valley in the early morning, light blocked by cliffs at midday, strong backlight in the late afternoon. And many of these changes happen very rapidly. As I made this photograph I could virtually watch the shadow move over the trees from the right.

The granite face rising beyond this meadow – one of the two I mentioned above – has always attracted me for some reason. Although not as high as the much more famous El Capitan, in some ways it seems to me to look more forbidding. It seems to lack the obvious crack systems seen on El Capitan, and unlike the larger wall, which is often bathed in sun, this one is often in shadow. In winter it casts a shadow across this portion of the Valley in the middle of the day, though a low spot may allow a beam of light to sweep across this area in the late afternoon.

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

Autumn Cottonwood Trees, Meadow, Fog

November 11, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning fog drifts through a stand of cottonwood trees with golden autumn leaves, Yosemite Valley

Like essentially everyone who has photographed much in Yosemite Valley, I know this little stand of cottonwood trees very well. It is an obvious attractive photographic subject since its densely grouped trees stand apart from other trees in the middle of a meadow, its “perfect cottonwood-ness” is broken by the presence of a couple of other trees almost hidden within the stand, there are a variety of potential backgrounds for the small grove, at the right times it can be beautifully lit, and the meadow often forms beautiful ground fog early in the morning during certain seasons and conditions. Since the fall color of the trees seemed near its peak, I made a plan to be out there at one of the potentially ideal times on Halloween morning.

On the prior day I had decided on the spot from which I would photograph, with the idea being to make a fairly tightly cropped photograph of the trees with a bit of canyon wall in the background. With this plan in mind, I woke up in the darkness and arrived here well before sunrise and went directly to the spot I had picked out. I was very happy to find ground fog drifting over the meadow and frost on its dried grasses. I started photographing almost right away, before there was any direct light here or anywhere else in the Valley, and I planned to shoot right through sunrise and the point when the first direct light strikes the meadow and this group of trees. Before long, the first bit of sunlight came to the upper edge of the trees, and the light changed quickly as the beam of light from up near Half Dome moved down across the trees and began to cast alternating light and shadow across the meadow. This image from the series of photographs seems like the best combination of fog (which began to dissipate as the sun arrived), sunlight on trees and meadow, and background still in shade.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: cliff

Forest and Cliffs, Autumn

Tall Trees, Meadow, Autumn

Meadow, Trees, Granite Wall

Autumn Cottonwood Trees, Meadow, Fog

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