Tag Archives: dissipate

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

Rat Rock Island, Winter Sky

January 8, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Clouds from a dissipating winter storm above Rat Island and the northern San Francisco Bay

For such a beautiful little island, this place certainly has a nasty name! I have intended to visit this place for a few years now, but had never quite gotten around to it – so I used a San Francisco photowalk devoted to “long exposure photography” as the impetus to finally make it. We had started much earlier in the morning in the Marin Headlands, photographing San Francisco Bay, and at that time a winter weather front was making its way through the area and producing a rather cloudy dawn. Leaving there, the group headed to the small state park where this scene is located. I arrived there before almost anyone else, so I headed to this location and had it to myself for a few minutes.

The previous evening some had been discussing the weather prospects, and I had pointed out that often the most interesting skies come on the heels of awful weather, and this moment serves as an example. An hour earlier and a few miles away, the overcast was thick and gray, but here the trailing edge of the storm was bringing layers of clouds that were thinning and allowing the early morning light through. But this quality of sky and light lasted only a short time, and less than an hour later these beautiful early morning clouds were largely gone.

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

Evening Clouds, Tuolumne River Valley

November 25, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening clouds from dissipating afternoon thunderstorms in early evening light above the Tuolumne River Valley, Yosemite National Park.

I recently posted a photograph of wildly colorful sunset clouds made a bit earlier on this same evening this past September as I was concluding a week-long photography backpack into the Yosemite back-country. By the time I had the photograph shown here, the most psychedelic of the sunset colors had begun to fade (though the reddish coloration on the granite is from that light) and I turned my attention to the thinning clouds.

Not much earlier, these clouds had been part of a massive line-up of huge thunderstorms over Yosemite high-country. I had escaped the rains since I was now in the relative lowlands around Glen Aulin, but it was clear that these had been some powerful localized storms. But as typically happens on many Sierra evenings, the giant storms soon dissipated and the clouds thinned to transparency as the day came to an end. By the time I made this photograph only a bit of direct sunlight was striking the tops of the highest remaining clouds.

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

Dissipating Storm Clouds, Sunset

November 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Sunset light on dissipating thunderstom clouds above granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

Late on this September afternoon in the Yosemite back-country I had a good idea that something might happen around sunset, but I could not have known in advance just how intense the cloud color would turn out to be. The set-up was classic. Thunder storms had built up throughout the afternoon, and by late in the day I would see and hear large storms to my north and east – though I remained right on the edge of the storm potential as I was a bit further west. As evening approached the cloud-building forces began to diminish, leaving the tops of the larger cells unsupported, and they began to thin and stretch westward, curving up and over my location along the Tuolumne River.

Knowing that interesting light of one sort or another was probable, I walked to an area of granite slabs and bowls that I had photographed when visiting this area at the start of my trip nearly a week earlier. As I considered a few photographs of the granite and trees in that area, my attention kept being drawn to the sky. At first it remained a relatively low contrast mass of gray, though the thinning clouds started to allow views through falling virga towards more distant clouds that rose into the sunlight. Then, as the sun dropped and the foreground lost the direct light, the clouds began to light up and take on wildly saturated colors. (A technical note: in many of the photographs, though not in this one, the dynamic range between cloud highlights and foreground was so large that it required multiple exposures separated by up to five stops to capture it all!)

I moved to the base of the granite bowl in which I had photographed rocks and small trees a week before when I saw these spectacular clouds building to the north west. The color was simply unbelievable – and you can see that the intense saturated light was not just in the sky, but that it also colored the granite near the bottom of the image. For this photograph I used a short focal length to try to take in a large section of the flowing and wildly shaped and colored clouds.

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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Tag Archives: dissipate

Rat Rock Island, Winter Sky

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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.