Granite boulders lie in shallow waters of a sub-alpine lake reflecting shoreline trees, Yosemite National Park.
This quiet little lake lies unobtrusively just off of highway 120 across the Sierra Nevada in Yosemite National Park. I’ve posted a few photographs from here before and noted that, as far as I know, the lake doesn’t even have an official name. There is just a small parking loop where you can pull out and then wander down to the lake, typically in complete solitude.
The light is a bit tricky here since the lake is in a depression where ridges to the east block the morning light. However, the wonderful rocks scattered along the shoreline make up for this! I made this photograph, and several others in the sequence, by shooting with a long lens from the other side of the lake. The low camera angle and still water created some very interesting reflections above the barely visible underwater logs and rocks.
A small pond reflects trees and glaciated boulders, Yosemite National Park.
This is a little location that I’ve returned to since I first discovered it a few years ago when I made a random stop along Tioga Pass Road to photograph some fog, looked away from the road, and saw a faint trail leading off into a little valley that looked to be full of rocks. Later I returned and wandered out on the trail and discovered a surprising landscape with glaciated granite, small pools, open forest, and small meadows. The first time I photographed there I had little time, so it ended up being more of a scouting visit than a shoot. However, this summer I planned to reserve part of a morning to wander back up this trail during the time when the light would still be good.
The pools here are almost completely still. The water is flowing, but not much, especially in the small granite rimmed pools like this one. The light was just barely beginning to filter down through the trees, so I had to be a bit careful to avoid hot spots where the sun shone. I’d share where this spot is, except that if you think about what you are passing as you drive along Tioga Pass Road, and occasionally stop and look around, you can probably find your own little spots like this one.
Morning light shines on the trees clinging to massive granite domes in the high country of Yosemite National Park.
I’ll write a bit less about this photograph since I posted it already in a color rendition and described some of the background of the image in that earlier post. The basic idea is that I used a very long focal length to isolate the single primary tree against a world of granite that recedes toward the rising sun that is above and out of the frame to the right.
When I made the photograph I had a pretty good idea that it might work as black and white. In fact, though I don’t recall for certain, I think I was leaning towards thinking of the scene in black and white when I made the exposure. (Those last two sentences must seem strange if not almost perverse to people whose primary background is in film!) Sometimes, as with this scene, I end up liking both versions, at least at first. While I may end up leaning toward one or the other more after I live with the prints a while, right now I go back and forth. Of course, when two things are different it is not necessarily the case that one must be better than the other; sometimes they are just different.
Oddly, one thing that inclined me towards black and white ends up also suggesting color. Because so much of the content of the frame is nearly monochromatic I think I originally felt that with so little color to work with that it might make sense to just let it be monochromatic. But then, “with so little color to work with,” the subtle effect of color begins, in some ways, to be even more important.
Morning light shines on the trees clinging to massive granite domes in the high country of Yosemite National Park.
This photograph was the result of an odd little sequence of events. While driving along Tioga Pass Road in the afternoon I looked more closely at an area that I have passed by many times and noticed that it was filled with glacial erratics, “loose” boulders left behind when glaciers retreated. It seemed like these boulders might be an interesting subject and since they were in a position where morning light seemed likely, I made a mental note to return in the morning over the next couple of days and see what I could photograph here.
The next morning, after photographing at dawn nearby, I decided to go to this spot and see what I could come up with. I arrived without a specific idea in mind beyond the plan to look around and see what I could find. My first idea was to photograph the boulders themselves, and I did make a few mediocre exposures of individual boulders and groups of boulders. As I played around with this idea I noticed that the light slanting across granite slabs a bit to the north of me looked interesting, especially since this light was also side- and back-lighting some of the trees. So I turned my attention to this potential subject.
Working with this idea I gradually became less interested in the boulders and more interested in the trees of the lodgepole forest that extended beyond the slabs, so I found a somewhat higher spot to shoot from and made a series of exposures that included layers of backlit trees extending beyond the granite. Beyond the trees was the base of Pywiack Dome, a subject that I have worked with a number of times in the past. Now I looked a bit higher than the forest that led my eye to the dome, and I photographed the boundary between the forest and the base of the dome. (Producing, I might add, a really, really boring photograph!) Looking a bit higher I saw the solitary tree near the lower left of this photograph, and I made a vertical exposure that included mostly just the tree and the expanse of granite above and around it. (This photograph will be here in a few days.) They I thought I would try a landscape orientation photograph, and as I worked with this I got the idea to include the right face of the closer granite dome against the darker shape of a more distant cliff. And, finally, I found this photograph.
(There is also a black and white version of this photograph. The text accompanying that version talks a bit about the black and white versus color issue.)
(Basic EXIF data may be available by “mousing over” large images in posts. Leave a comment if you want to know more.)
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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