A torrent of water from melting spring snow rushed through a rocky section of Cascade Creek, Yosemite National Park.
During the early part of the seasonal spring snowmelt runoff, Cascade Creek is transformed into a wild and raging torrent as the lower elevation snow in the upper portion of its drainage begins to melt quickly. Contributing to the spectacular effect is the very steep path the creek follows down the walls of the Merced Canyon before it makes one final leap over a waterfall and then joins with the main Merced River.
This bit of creek is another of those places in the Sierra that I have come to know very well. There are certain places where I like to say that I know individual rocks and trees, and this is one of them. I photograph here several times each year during all seasons and in all kinds of light. But my favorite is the early morning spring light, before the sun rises high enough to directly illuminate the creek bed, when the creek is flowing madly and twisting and turning around and over boulders.
Sea stacks line the rugged California Big Sur coastline below the Pacific Coast Highway.
I had some free time on Friday morning, so I decided to head over to the coast below Monterey. I had some discussions with someone earlier this week about photographs featuring coastal fog and hills, and I think that may be what planted the idea in my mind, though it turned out that conditions were not quite ideal for that particular sort of thing. However, it was a beautiful spring morning along the Big Sur coast, with the bright sun somewhat modulated by some atmospheric haze and a bit of fog here and there along ridge tops.
For those who may not have heard, driving this section of the Coast Highway is a bit tricky right now due to washouts and closures. I had to wait for a pilot vehicle to lead scores of us through one large section, and in another spot the road was reduced to a single lane by a large landslide. I understand that further south the road is actually closed completely, necessitating an inland detour.
The unusual traffic situation did create one advantage for me, however. Usually there is enough traffic on this famous route that driving along at very slow speeds annoys other drivers – so I sometimes have to keep going right past places I might otherwise want to stop and investigate. However, yesterday I quickly figured out that with 20-30 minutes between waves of traffic as the road opened and closed, all I had to do was pull over after passing one of the blockages, wait for the other cars to pass, and then drive in a more leisurely way with plenty of opportunities to stop.
So as I drove past this area that I had not really looked at closely in the past – it is between a couple of other spots that I know well – I was able to drive slowly, pull over to look more carefully, backtrack, and generally get to see it more than in the past. I first pulled off near this spot simply to turn around to go back and check a spot I had just passed. As I did so I noticed a painter packing up his gear. I did my “turn around,” looked at the spot I had passed, decided it wasn’t promising after all… and came right back to the spot where I had seen the painter. A short trail led down to the edge of the bluff and provided this view along the coast to the south.
A young tree grows against a granite wall along the north side of Yosemite Valley.
This tree (and its nearby oak partner) and I have become good friends over the past few years. I first photographed it in the fall some years back, though the oak made a better shot at that time given its fall color leaves. But every time I walk along a certain area under the cliffs on the north side of Yosemite Valley I check in here to see what the light is doing.
During the first weekend of May I was in the Valley for photography and to visit the reception for Michael Frye’s exhibit at the Ansel Adams Galley. After spending an enjoyable hour and a half or so viewing Michael’s prints and meeting and talking with a wonderful group of photographers and photography enthusiasts at the Gallery I left to go wander a bit and make some photographs. When I came to this spot, clouds were starting to appear in the late afternoon sky above the Valley. This is a kind of ideal light since these conditions soften but don’t completely destroy the sunlight, and diffused light gets down into the forest and fills out the shadows.
I love the texture of these huge blocks of flat granite, covered with lichen. I like the visual quality of this rock, but I also like the physical quality of it; this probably dates back to a time some years ago when I was a rock climber for a few years. So while the tree seems like the main subject here, the rock surface is for me just as important.
The springtime morning sun shines through a pair of oak trees in the Calero Hills south of San Jose, California.
On the final day of April and for the first time this season, I found to go for a hike at my favorite local park, a place where I have walked just about every available trail (and invented a few routes of my own) and photographed for a number of years. The park would not seem like anything all that special by comparison to some of the other places I visit, but it is close and I’ve gotten to know it in a way that makes it more special. The place is called the Calero County Park, part of the Santa Clara County Parks system.
The entrance to the park is in a broad valley that is largely occupied by stables. (Or, used to be – it looks like the stables must have closed since last season.) Rising from this valley are the typical grass-covered hills of central and northern California, with oaks and other trees scattered around and, in places, thicker trees and brush. At this time of year, the hills turn what I call “impossibly green” – and if you have seen them on a late-winter or early spring morning you know what I mean.
I started this hike a bit after dawn, so the golden hour light was more or less gone. I had a general idea of photographing some wildflowers (which didn’t happen – it was too windy) and some oak trees that grow alone or in small groups on the grass-covered hills. I passed a small lake – where a single egret often hangs out, but not on this morning – and topped a rise and descended into a small valley from which I have made quite a few photographs of oaks. It didn’t look too promising at first, but at the far end of this area I noticed that a pair of trees were still obscuring the sun and that I might be able to shoot straight into the sun with the trees blocking its disk, and get a photograph including the tree shadows on the hillside grasses.
This turned out to be another of those all-too-common ephemeral photographs in that the sun was starting to rise above the top branches of the tree and would soon be “out in the open,” making it much too bright for what I had in mind. So I worked quickly to set up tripod and camera and select a lens, then frame a composition, focus, and make a series of exposures that might be needed to deal with the huge dynamic range between direct sun and backlit tree trunks. By the time I had everything set up and was ready to shoot the sun had already risen above the upper branches, so I ended up looking for a slightly better shadow and putting the tripod down very low – and this gave me must enough time to make the series of exposures I figured I would need.
In the end, I got lucky. One single shot somehow managed to not blow the sun out too badly yet hold enough detail in the grass that a bit of work in post could bring it back. With all of the potential for lens flare – which I had to some extent in every shot – this one only had two small bits of it, and they were easily dealt with.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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