Dawn light on the snow-capped summit of Mount Gibbs above a frozen pond, Yosemite National Park.
This small pond is perhaps familiar to visitors to Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Pass, though more likely with a different appearance. Here, early on a cold morning on the day after Tioga Pass opened for the season, the pond is still mostly frozen and it is surrounded by deep snow banks. The summit of Mount Gibbs is just touched by the first morning light as it passes through clouds over the Sierra crest.
Trees at Olmsted Point are silhouetted against a brilliantly colorful spring sunset sky, Yosemite National Park.
I think everyone should occasionally get to post a just plain gaudy color sunset – and this is mine. While photographing Mount Conness from Olmsted Point was my primary goal on this evening, I also had some opportunities to swing the tripod around and point at other things from time to time. This is about as close as I can come to capturing the nearly hallucinogenic color of the sky as the brightest cloud illumination was centered directly overhead and beginning to move off to the west.
The color saturation was so intense that I had to under expose this by at least a stop in order to avoid blowing out the red channel and in order to retain some differentiation among the various shadings of color as they transitioned from very pink/red through orange and purple and on towards blue.
Clouds lit by alpenglow drift across the face of Mount Conness beyond the Tenaya Creek drainage, Yosemite National Park.
Earlier this week I posted another photograph of the same evening. This one was shot a bit earlier (believe it or not!) than the other photograph, as the intense and perhaps unexpected color display was just getting started. I’ll have more to write about the phenomenon in a future blog post that uses this evening as an example, but it almost seem like the sunset progressed backwards (oxymoron alert!) as it went on. It had begun with very boring and low contrast light, somewhat flattened by a haze that took on an increasingly ghastly blue-green hue as the light began to fade. Although the surroundings were spectacular on this opening day of Tioga Pass Road, the light and atmospheric conditions seemed to be conspiring to show them it their worst (literal and figurative) light.
But just at dusk a hint of pink appeared in some of the clouds ringing Mount Conness, the tall peak in the upper left. At first it was so faint that only those of us who were looking for it might have noticed, and we perhaps thought that we were simply trying to convince ourselves that something was going to happen. But the color increased, and as the more distant areas picked up better light, they shone through the foreground haze more clearly, and this haze faded in the same way that a scrim does in a theater when the front lights dim and the stage lights rise.
I find that this type of scene provides some of the most difficult technical and judgment challenges. So often the goal in an image, especially if it is going to be a print, is to try to get as much light into the scene as possible. A lot of the work in post-processing, at least for me, is done with the goal of trying to fill the image with light by means of various careful adjustments, often involving the use of masked curve layers. But here, the coloration depends upon not being overly bright – too much light either decreases the intensity of the pink and purple shadings or else sends them off into the land of the grotesque and gaudy. And the light in shadows – and there are a lot of shaded areas in this scene! – is very blue, much more so than the untrained eye would imagine when looking at the scene in person. This requires another set of tricky and subjective judgments – it would not look right to leave portions of the scene as blue “as they really were,” nor would it look right if the blue were diminished too much. But how much is right? There is no objective answer that I know of, so the goal (for example, on the large granite face of Polly Dome at the left) is to come up with a balance that seems blue enough but not too blue. A similar issue arises in these dark areas when it comes to deciding how bright is bright enough. Believe it or not, virtually nothing in this image is actually black, with the possible exception of a few very tiny areas in the lower left. The luminosity of the very dark areas had to be lifted a bit… but how much is just right? Again, a matter of personal judgment about which there is no objectively right answer.
All of that technical stuff aside, this evening provided one of the most glorious, albeit brief, displays of sublime light I have seen in the Sierra.
Morning sun illuminates two gnarled trees at the base of Pywiack Dome, Yosemite National Park
I should begin by acknowledging that I sort of think of these as being “Charlie’s Trees,” since I first saw them in a marvelous photograph by Charles Cramer during a visit to the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley. The photograph was tucked away in an inconspicuous place up high above a doorway, but it caught my eye immediately. I knew right away from the composition and the quality of the light that it was Charlie’s work.
On the morning of the day after Tioga Pass opened this year, I had gone early in the morning to a spot just below this location, planning to photograph the high water of Tenaya Creek near where the creek from Cathedral Lakes joins and where the combined flow was flooding the meadow below Pywiack Dome. Finishing with that subject, I decided to head back up toward Tuolumne. Almost immediately as I passed by the base of Pywiack Dome, I could see that the morning sun was beginning to come around the shoulder of the dome and strike these trees and that the background of thicker forest and snow was softened a bit by haze and backlight. Very conscious of not wanting to recreate another photographer’s composition, I decided to use a long lens and let these two old and weathered trees fill the left half of the frame.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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