Tag Archives: evening

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

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

December 7, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Photographers Charles Cramer and Karl Kroeber working in golden hour light along the shore of a sub-alpine lake high in the Sierra Nevada back-country of Yosemite National Park.

Look! A photograph of people! :-)

I spent a week or so on the trail in the Yosemite back-country with a group of five other photographers this past September. We spent a good stretch of time in the area of some scenic lakes in the northeastern portion of the park. I was out for a week and a day, while the rest of the group spent a few additional days on the trail. Not too long after arriving at the nearby sub-alpine lake that was to be our home for several days, various members of the group started to explore the surrounding area, and on this evening we all decided to climb up the valley from “our” lake to the next higher lake along the drainage. We travelled more or less cross-country up the shallow valley of the creek between the two lakes, passing through beautiful meadows before arriving along the shore of this lake very late in the afternoon.

Once we arrived we more or less split up and focused on different portions of the lake and its surroundings. I mostly shot in one very small area where some beautiful granite boulders were embedded in the shoreline meadow, providing an interesting foreground for photographs across the lake to a nearby peak as the golden hour light arrived. At one point I noticed that my friends Charlie Cramer and Karl Kroeber were shooting nearby, so I paused from my landscape photography to pivot my camera in their direction and make a photograph of them as they worked the golden hour light.

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

Glacial Erratics, Near Glen Aulin

November 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Three glacial erratic boulders atop a granite dome near Glen Aulin, Yosemite National Park.

Looking for something to photograph one evening during my September back-country photography trip into the Glen Aulin and McCabe Lakes area of Yosemite National Park, I climbed up from our camp site to the top of this small granite dome or “whaleback” above the valley of Glen Aulin. The dome is merely the most open and exposed portion of a ridge of more durable rock that rises a ways up the slope from near where we were camped, and from its “summit” I had a 360-degree panorama of the surrounding landscape as the day came to an end.

When I first arrived at this spot more than an hour earlier, the sky was almost completely clouded over. This was one of those situations in which the immediate photographic prospects seemed quite limited, with gray skies and murky atmosphere, but with some potential for interesting things to happen if the clouds thinned as sunset approached. So I decided to stick around in this spot rather than wandering around looking for something else, and in the end the clouds did thin. Before I made this photograph, one of the last of the evening, I had managed to find a range of subjects as the light changed: the light from breaks in the clouds began to move across a forest to my right and light a small prominence nearby; light coming over the ridge at the far right back-lit some haze behind trees on a lower ridge that was closer to me; and finally the remaining clouds took on a bit of color right as the sun dropped below the horizon.

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

Trees and Granite Cliffs

November 10, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Trees ascend rocky slopes to the base of steep granite cliffs, Tuolumne River Canyon, Yosemite National Park.

There are still a few more photographs to be found among those I made during my weeklong mid-September backpack into the Yosemite back-country. I spent several days photographing in the Glen Aulin area and this is one more of the photographs from that area. In the evening the sun sets down canyon from Glen Aulin, and we had travelled to a spot where we could see down into the upper reaches of the canyon as the sun set. While I was photographing some closer subjects, I looked up and saw the light from the west back- and side-lighting trees at the upper edge of the forest before it gives way to steep granite cliffs.

One of the great pleasures of this trip was having the opportunity to spend a number of days in each location. We spent three days in this area at the start of the trip and I had the better part of two additional days on the way back to my car. In many cases, I might initially wonder how I could possibly spend that many days shooting one small area within walking distance of my camp. But many days later I had discovered more and more potential subjects… and I almost felt like I was running out of necessary time!

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: evening

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

Glacial Erratics, Near Glen Aulin

Trees and Granite Cliffs

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