Golden light reflects on the muddy winter flow of Redwood Creek as it flows over boulders and new late-winter growth.
Even in this dry year in Northern California, there is finally water running in the creeks of the redwood forests. I arrived fairly early on this early March day, looking for trillium flowers. (Although they are not the subject of this photograph, I did find those flowers later on this visit.) As I walked up the trail to enter this park, the sun had risen but it was too early for its light to make it down to the forest floor or to the creek. However, the reflected light of the sun hitting trees high overhead was turning the water a sort of golden brown color, which contrasted in a striking way with the bluish light on the rocks and in some of the shaded areas of the water. New spring (though that season was still several weeks away) growth was coming up everywhere, including in shallow areas of the creek such as this one.
Because I could not get right down to the creek here, I actually photographed this with a fairly long telephoto lens. I had to look around carefully to find a spot where there was enough of a break in the foreground vegetation to provide me with a gap to shoot through. I was also lucky that the plants were not moving a lot in the creek, since the exposure time was surprisingly long – there isn’t a lot of light down in the bottom a canyon through the redwood forest!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Swift water flows over granite along the bank of the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park.
In this section of the Tuolumne River – as in many other places throughout the Sierra Nevada – the river passes through a steep section and across granite slabs that span the full width of the river. As the water flows over the granite it forms constantly changing patterns of rock and whitewater that can only be predicted in general ways. The spot included in the photograph was right along the edge of the river, and you can see the transition between the diminished flow along the bottom edge and the faster and more abundant water in the main channel beyond.
Part of the fun of shooting this sort of subject – and shooting it is a pleasant way to spend an hour along the river – is in trying to find workable compositions in such a changeable subject. And making it even more “fun,” the shutter speed becomes an important decision as it determines just much the image is affected by motion blur and how much of the scene is stopped. Fortunately, digital cameras make this process just a bit more predictable and productive, since they allow the photographer to quickly see the result of composition and shutter speed choices and verify whether or not the educated guesses were correct, and to see just how the infinitely variable and unpredictable patterns of flowing water come together at the instant of exposure.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Early light on morning clouds above the Tuolumne River Canyon below Glen Aulin, Yosemite National Park.
This is the same bend in the Tuolumne River, located below Glen Aulin and before the river descends toward Waterwheel Falls and eventually the abomination of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, that was shown in a photograph of late afternoon light that I posted here a few days ago. This time it was early morning. We had been up well before sunrise and had wandered off in various directions to find early morning photographic subjects. My main goals were the cascading water along the edge of this section of the river (a bit of which is visible in the lower portion of the frame) and a granite bowl to the right of this view. As I came over the rise above this area before descending I saw the beautiful sparse clods to the west, probably extending to the edge of the Sierra and still with pastel colors from dawn light.
A technical observation about this photograph. This scene presented a technical challenge in the form of an extremely wide dynamic range between the bright and red-saturated first direct sunlight on the ridge at upper left and the much darker areas of forest in shade along the river and in the foreground. With a digital exposure, in a scene like this one, the primary rule for me is “don’t blow out the highlights.” If I had overexposed the sky the clouds would have turned into pure white, texture-free blotches and that bit of early sun on the rocks would have lost detail and taken on a very strange coloration. However, an exposure that protects the highlights in a scene like this one can leave the shadows nearly black. While it is possible to “fix” that a bit in post, the result is not necessarily very good when the dynamic range is very large. One “traditional” solution would have been to use a graduated neutral density filter (or “GND”) that blocked some of the brightest areas at the top of the frame while not affecting the lower 2/3 or so. But I don’t use them, and in this case the result would not have been totally wonderful since the same filtering that would reduce sky brightness would also make the large granite dome at the right end up nearly black at the top.
So instead of filtering at the time of exposure, I decided that I would use the roughly comparable, but more flexible, “exposure blending” techniques in post. With that in mind I made several photographs at different exposures – some at shorter shutter speeds to avoid the blown out highlights and others at increasingly slower shutter speeds to reveal the shadow detail that my eyes could see but which the camera otherwise could not. During the post-production phase, I selected two of the exposures, one that was as bright as possible but without blowing out the sky and sunlight, and the other two stops lighter to reveal that shadow detail in a way that seemed consistent with what I recall the scene actually looked like. The two source images were carefully adjusted during raw conversion and their two layers carefully aligned. With the darker image (the one with the “good” sky) on the top, I began to “paint” out the mask to reveal the details of the foreground forest, river, and rocks. (In answer to the expected question, this is not the same as HDR. That is a more or less automated process that works in a different way. Exposure blending is typically a manual process that relies a great deal on the photographers judgment and recall of the actual scene.)
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Granite boulders deflect the turbulent flow of Cascade Creek as it descends to the Merced River, Yosemite National Park.
This photograph is another in my continuing study of the boulders and flowing water of Yosemite’s Cascade Creek. I made this photograph fairly early in the morning on the weekend when Tioga Pass opened this year. I arrived before the scheduled 8:00 a.m. opening of Tioga Pass Road and decided that it would be more interesting and useful to photograph this subject than to wait in line so that I could be on my way over the pass at exactly the moment the road opened, especially when the morning brings shaded, diffused light to this cascade.
As I repeatedly photograph this subject, I begin to know it much more thoroughly. Partly it is a matter of understanding the seasonal and even daily ebb and flow of water and light at this place, but it is also a process of becoming very familiar with smaller details of the scene. When I first photographed here this rock outcropping was something that I occasionally worked to minimize in some compositions, but it has since come to be an interesting subject on its own. It extends into the torrent, forcing the water to flow around (and partially over, in high water) before dropping steeply to the right, running into other rocks, and making a quick and turbulent left turn before heading over another drop. Because it sits in the middle of all of this wild water, it is often covered with water and this water reflects the light of the open sky beyond the shaded confines of this narrow canyon.
