Tag Archives: forest

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

Forest, Morning Light

December 23, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light strikes a tree in a small grove of trees surrounded by Sierra Nevada granite boulders, Yosemite National Park.

This is really a very unremarkable scene in most ways. The foreground tree, with its top leaning over to the right, sits in a mixed forest/meadow area behind some rocks that look like the remains of an old glacial moraine. (This area was largely formed by glaciers, and their evidence is everywhere here.) Beyond the moraine and out of sight from this position is a good-size subalpine lake, and above that rocky, talus-covered slopes lead upwards to much higher alpine ridges and peaks.

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

Peninsula and Trees, Morning

December 19, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on a tree-covered peninsula along the edge of a subalpine lake with a talus slope backdrop, Yosemite National Park.

I think that the primary thing that first caught my attention in this little scene was the very twisted and curving tree about 1/3 of the way in from the right edge of the frame. I wonder why one tree ended up growing in such an odd way when its neighbors seem to have managed to grown in a straight and conventional manner? The light on these trees was coming from almost directly behind them, as the sun had just topped the ridge above and out of the frame. Because the talus slope is fairly steep, portions of it remain in shade.

This photograph posed a few interesting challenges, and they are probably not all immediately apparent. One that may be visible to those who are familiar with such scenes is the fact that back-light like this can create some very bright highlights that can “blow out” in a digital camera exposure. In fact, these highlights are what determine the exposure for such a scene. If accommodating the bright highlights makes the shadows too dark, I can either work a bit in post to bring back some shadow detail or I can make a separate exposure for the shadows and blend the two in post. That wasn’t necessary here – I was able to capture the scene in a single exposure. The second odd little problem was that swarms of mosquitos were flying just above the water all around the shoreline of the lake. Although you cannot see them in this small jpg, there were many, many little traces of the bugs in the air – so many, in fact, that I had to somewhat laboriously clone out a good number of the most obvious of them.

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

Boulder and Small Tree

December 17, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small tree grows from the side of a boulder near the shoreline of a subalpine back-country lake in Yosemite National Park.

This little tree seems like an impossibility. In a tiny crack in a very large boulder, some distance from the shore in this subalpine lake, it somehow manages to live and seemingly even thrive. It is hard to imagine a more difficult place for a tree to grow. It is also difficult, though interesting, to imagine what this tree might look like if it manages to succeed in the long-term and live for perhaps a hundred years or more. Will it get to the point that its roots begin to grow out of the small crack and spread across more of the rock, and might it form a small pocket of soil that supports other smaller plants?

I made the photograph in the morning, when the light of the early sun was just coming over a ridge above and to the right of the tree. It slanted across the top of the boulder and picked off the upper portion of the tree, leaving its lower truck and the face of the boulder in shade.

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

Granite Ridge and Trees

December 9, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A backlit granite ridge above the Tuolumne River is topped by trees.

I think that this is probably going to be the final riff on the subject of this particular ridge, the subject of several photographs I have posted in recent weeks. As I probably wrote at least once before… I climbed up from our camp onto the top of a small dome-like granite whaleback that gave me an open view in almost all directions and a high point from which to look over a good section of the Tuolumne River as it passes through a section of the Yosemite back-country. I arrived at this spot in the very late afternoon and then stayed there for perhaps two hours as the light gradually shifted from that of afternoon to sunset and then twilight.

This photograph was made before the golden hour, though I think that a bit of added warmth is already beginning to appear in the color of the light. The sun was coming from above the distant ridge seen faintly through the haze above the valley of the Tuolumne, and it was periodically blocked by some high clouds. While the clouds can “blah-ify” the light pretty effectively, when they are not completely covering the sky they can cast interesting and temporary light across the landscape as they move past. For a moment the light came brightly through the clouds and back-lit these beautiful trees that were growing on the granite surface of this dome.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: forest

Forest, Morning Light

Peninsula and Trees, Morning

Boulder and Small Tree

Granite Ridge and Trees

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