“Evening, Tuolumne River” — Evening light on forests and peaks as the Tuolumne River flows through Tuolumne Meadows.
This quiet scene was even more peaceful than usual. It was an early July evening and the campground was still closed. There was hardly anyone else up there. Walking in the meadow I doubt if I saw more than a dozen people. I paused near some half-submerged rocks along the bank of the river and made this photograph looking east toward the Sierra crest in late evening light.
Let me share a secret for those of you who like solitude. Tuolumne Meadows can be a pretty busy place during the peak summer season, between folks staying at the campground and those driving in and out for the day. But at the two most beautiful times of the day the the meadow is often nearly deserted. In the morning many people are still sleeping or on their long rives to the location, and in the evening they are again driving or else back in camp fixing dinner.
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“Blue Hour: Lake and Fog” — Dusk fog rises from the surface of a subalpine lake reflecting a Sierra crest peak.
I had thought that I was done photographing for the evening when I passed this little lake and saw the fog rising in dusk light. The light was fading fast, so I quickly got out my tripod and set up for some relatively long exposures — this one was 15 seconds. The conditions arose after an afternoon and evening of rain ended and the skies began to clear, allowing fog to appear here and at every other similar body of water.
Photographs in these conditions — essentially twilight — test our understanding of what it means for a photograph to be “realistic.” The truth is that our eyes don’t see like this in extremely low light — so what you get here is a sort of “what the camera saw” image. (The eyes also do not interpolate drifting fog over a 15 second period!)
“Lokrum Island, Adriatic Sea” — Lokrum Island and the calm Adriatic Sea at Dubrovnik, evening.
We were in Croatia for a week and a half in the summer of 2023, at the end of a ten weeks of travel in (mostly Southern) Europe. Our visit to this country began with a few days in the remarkable old walled city of Dubrovnik. Late one day I decided it was time to circumnavigate the city on the walkways along the top of the old walls that surround it. The day came to an end as I walked, and I made this photograph right around dusk.
You have probably heard of the “rules of composition.” I’m pretty sure I violated most of them, if not all, in this photograph. “Rules” is the wrong context here — that word implies that there are specific right and wrong ways to approach composition. Instead the goal should be to understand the effects of compositional choices on the mood of a photograph. Here I wanted to express the stillness and lack of dynamism in this scene, its peacefulness and quiet. I think that the almost evenly divided vertical helps with that. And I wanted a bit of a sense of mystery — hence the bit of the island intruding into the frame from the far left.
“After the Storm, Mt. Gibbs” — Evening light comes to Mt. Gibbs and Tuolumne Meadows as an afternoon storm clears.
I have learned that sometimes the light arrives when you don’t expect it. The day had unexpectedly turned stormy, and to my surprise it rained for hours, continuing past the time when Sierra afternoon thunderstorms typically dissipate. I wondered if it would clear at all, but I headed into the Tuolumne area anyway, thinking that I’d surely want to be there if the light did arrive. And it did! Right around sunset the clouds to the west thinned and beams of light played across the landscape.
One of the biggest surprises when I entered the park late on this afternoon was that a significant hail storm had apparently moved through earlier, dropping so much hail that from a distance it looked like fresh snowfall on Mt. Gibbs.
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