Morning sun light illuminates autumn trees at Ahwahnee Meadow and dissolves the last remnants of morning ground fog, Yosemite Valley.
This was just about the very last exposure I made in this series. As I wrote earlier, I had started shooting in Ahwahnee Meadow before sunrise, on a very cold morning (frost on the grass!) when ground fog obscured the trees. I continued to photograph here for perhaps an hour and a half as the sun light began to touch the highest cliffs and peaks and slight breezes began to move the ground fog. Finally the light began to make its way down to the valley floor, hitting the trees along the west edge of the meadow. At this point I figured it wouldn’t be long before the trees that I was shooting would be touched by the first bit of light. This photograph was made at just about that moment when, fortuitously, some thin clouds moved overhead and muted the fist light to strike the yellow leaves of this grove of trees, standing above the very last remnants of the ground fog.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Thin morning ground fog floats above the dry autumn grasses of Ahwahnee Meadow below the granite cliffs of Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley.
During the cooler and wetter months of the year, ground fog often forms in the meadows of Yosemite Valley. Ahwahnee Meadow is one of the places I like to photograph these conditions, and since this was the morning after a damp and rainy day, I arrived here very early in anticipation of conditions that might produce the fog. It was very cold when I arrived, certainly below freezing by at least a few degrees. At first the fog was much denser and a bit deeper. I have photographs from this earlier pre-dawn period when a herd of deer passed through the meadow. Eventually, as the sun rose high enough that the light beams began to clear the mountains to the east of the Valley, the first light began to strike the upper slopes and walls of Glacier Point. As this happened and the air began to move and the temperature stopped dropping, the fog began to thin. This photograph was made shortly before the fog actually dissipated completely, and thin streamers of mist are broken up by clearer areas.
I have to admit that I do not know what the foreground plant is. (Hint: I won’t mind even a tiny bit if someone wants to write and tell me! :-) Cottony tufts are found at the top of long stems, growing out of odd shaped pods. I shot this with a very wide angle lens so that I could include some of this foreground foliage and the fill width of Glacier Point.
On a technical note, this image incorporates a blend of two exposures. Portions of the sky at the left side of the frame were very bright, while much of the rest of the scene was in shade and a lot darker. Almost the entire frame is from the 1/15 second exposure, but I have manually blended in a bit of the 1/40 second exposure in the area of cloudy sky at upper left in order to retain a bit of detail there. Also, though it should be obvious, this was shot with an ultra-wide angle lens – a 17mm focal length on a full frame DSLR. If you are at all familiar with this location in the Valley you will recognize that this is a bit of an unusual view.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
A dense grove of aspens along Dunderberg Road in the eastern Sierra Nevada.
If you passed by this grove along the rough, gravel Dunderberg Road you might not even think to stop – in many ways it seems a lot like many other aspen groves along in this part of the Sierra and along this road. However, I once stopped in this spot the first time I drove this road and for some reason the location has become one of those that draws me back. This time I arrived very late in the afternoon, just as the sun was slipping behind Dunderberg Peak to the west, leaving the trees in shaded early evening light. This section of the grove is remarkable for the thickness of the trees – you might not guess from the photo, but trees are not all that tall. It also is more open than some groves of this size and it isn’t quite as cluttered with non-aspen plants that sometimes make it difficult to find a composition.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Black and white photograph of a “sliding rock” on a cloudy morning at the Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park, California.
The weather gods were not on my side during my visit to the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley near the end of March. My plan was to shoot sunset and sunrise, and in between to do night photography. As I drove out there on the terrible washboard gravel road my hopes were high – I saw some interesting looking clouds that looked like they might even form into lenticular clouds. When I arrived I shot a bit in decent light at the “Grandstand” feature near the north end of the playa.
Unfortunately, the good light was short-lived. Before I left the Grandstand a high, thin back of clouds spread across the sky. It stayed in the evening (tantalizing me with some bits of clear sky far to the west), blocked the full moon all night, and was still there when I wandered out onto the playa in the morning to do some early shots. It never did really clear, and I came back from the playa with far fewer good images than I expected. (I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve had uniform great luck with lighting on every previous visit, so I was probably due for less than great light.)
In order to make this photograph work I did quite a bit of post-processing, some of which I anticipated when I made the exposure. First of all, I realized that getting everything from the very close rock to the distant ridge in focus would be a problem. So I made three exposures, “focus bracketing” them with one focus on the far ridge, one focused on the rock, and one focused in between. I made a blend of the three exposures in post, keeping the most focused portions of each.
Because the light and colors were fairly flat I decided to go with a black and white interpretation. The conversion was fairly straightforward, but here I also decided to indulge in a bit of post-processing. I duplicated the background layer, turned it into and “overlay,” and added some Gaussian blur. With a bit of dodging, burning, and work with curves, the image ended up where I imagined it would.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Technical Data:
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 80mm
ISO 200, f/16, 1/10 second
keywords: sliding, moving, gliding, rock, stone, racetrack, race, track, playa, cracked, mud, earth, ground, cloudy, mountain, hill, barren, desert, rugged, track, trail, black and white, monochrome, death valley, national, park, california, usa, north america, landscape, nature, travel, scenic, stock
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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