Tag Archives: crest

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

Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon

October 5, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Afternoon storm clouds clear from the sunset sky above Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon, Yosemite National Park.

With this photograph I get to tell another of the “serendipitous photograph” stories that seem to keep coming up in my work. In this case, we had been camped near the lake in the lower area of the photograph for several days, getting to know the place and having time to carefully photograph various areas nearby. On a previous evening we had climbed to a second lake a few hundred feet higher than the “main” lake, from which one of our group decided to traverse a nearby slope. He ended up at another alpine lake that looked interesting, and the next morning others went with him to visit it. I didn’t, because I had some other things that I wanted to photograph in morning light and because I had a hunch that the light might turn out to be more interesting in the evening, mainly because the area of the lake was open to the west and, therefore, the evening light.

So in the evening, after our typical very early dinner, I departed on a walk to the upper lake that my friends had visited that morning, wandering around “our” lake and through the surrounding forest to pick up a rocky ramp that ascended toward the lake. However, I apparently missed a turn somewhere. I finished the main part of the climb and apparently should have turned left immediately – but I continued on straight ahead and soon found myself in a little meadowy area with a rather steep bunch of rocks between me and my goal. I finally found a circuitous route up a series of ramps, but now it was getting too close to sunset and my turn-around time, so I had to retrace my steps without getting to the lake.

I returned to the small meadow and made a few photographs there, then headed back toward the route by which I had ascended. Despite not making the lake, one of my main goals had been to get up high to photograph the surrounding terrain at sunset, especially since earlier in the day large thunderclouds had been building to the east and creating the possibility of some very special evening light. As I descended the upper part of the “ramp,” the pre-sunset colors started to light up and I quickly found a spot with a good vantage point to view this in several directions. Among the last photographs I made as the light started to fade was the series including this image. (It is actually a composite of two exposures – one for the very bright and saturated clouds and another for the darker shadows down near that lake.) Beyond the lake is the left end of rocky Shepherds Crest and even further in the distance is Virginia Canyon and then the Sierra crest.

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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, Photographs: Yosemite

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

September 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A tree and granite slab are lit by brilliant sunset light from a dissipating evening thunderstorm, Yosemite National Park.

This was another of those sometimes-surprising bursts of evening Sierra color that results in effects so gaudy that they almost seem unreal – but this is real. I was camped down in a valley among trees so I wasn’t initially expecting much in the way of spectacular sunset photography. Instead, I planned to take advantage of the early shadows in the valley and get some evening photographs under soft light without any direct sun at all. I first worked some moving water where the nearby river flowed across granite slabs, and then I contemplated photographing some small plants in deeply cracked and patterned granite. As a worked my way across this granite, I remembered a small tree on the other side of the bowl that had looked like an interested photo subject a few days ago, so I walked over to that area where the tree stands in a shallow granite bowl.

Earlier in the afternoon I could see huge thunderheads building up to my east, but they did not move far enough west to affect me with anything more than a bit of gray sky. However, as the clouds built up to higher elevations, their tops began to take on the familiar “anvil” shape and the upper portions of the “anvils” began to spread to the west and out over my position. This is a classic setup for potentially spectacular evening sky color. Near sunset the clouds can pick up intense red/orange coloration from the sun setting in the west. At the same time, the storms begin to dissipate, creating semi-transparent “curtains” of virga (falling rain that doesn’t reach the ground), unusual shapes along the bottoms of the clouds, clouds emerging out of the gray murk as the sunset light picks them up.

As I arrived at my little tree, I quickly lost interest in that subject as the cloud light show began. First the bottom of the thunderhead began to turn brilliantly orange and red. Then the lower reaches of the small storm began to produce very unusual cloud shapes including mammatus clouds. Virga produced a brightly colored by semi-transparent scrim. It quickly became so bright that the red/orange colors began to wash the granite bowl, and I turned my camera from the little tree to the uphill granite surfaces and the clouds above.

In this vertical format image the tip of a small tree extends above the top of a dome-like area above me, and the brilliant light from the clouds washes the dome with color. The colors here have not been “amped up” in post – in fact, I’ve actually toned some of them down a bit!

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

Thunderstorm Over Barney Lake

September 2, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Rain from an afternoon thunderstorm begins to fall above Barney Lake, in the eastern Sierra Nevada near Mammoth Lakes, California.

This is yet another older photograph that I found again while reviewing nearly a decade of raw files recently. I actually have previously posted another similar photograph of this scene in the past, but I think this one is also effective and is somewhat different.

I came to this lake when I had to leave a group of friends with whom I was about four days into a 14-day backpacking trip in the central Sierra back in 2005. On day four I woke up feeling less that great and thought I might be coming down with some sort of “bug” that I didn’t want to deal with in the back-country, partly because we were about to enter a section of trail with no quick and easy way out, and also because I didn’t want to take a chance on slowing down or halting the rest of my party. So I bailed out on the morning of day five. The rest of the gang went south on the John Muir Trail while I backtracked to the north and exited over Duck Pass.

I recall the day fairly well – perhaps because I travelled the trail twice in two days! It was easy hiking back along the JMT to the turnoff to the pass, where I paused to enjoy the view of Duck Lake. As I began the ascent to the pass above the lake, thunderstorms quickly developed, and I recall being surprised when the rain started much more quickly and much sooner than I had predicted. I believe I had to duck (no pun intended) beneath a nearby tree and quickly take out rain gear and pack cover before moving on in the rain. After I crossed the pass and started the descent towards Mammoth Lakes, the storm moved elsewhere and rays of light broke over Barney Lake below the pass where I paused to make a few photographs of this light against the backdrop of more distant peaks and falling rain.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: crest

Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon

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Evening Thunderstorm Above Shepherd’s Crest

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Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

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Thunderstorm Over Barney Lake

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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.