“Trees, Evening Light” — A row of pine trees at the edge of a subalpine meadow catches the last evening light.
Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows, in the park’s high country, gets special and quite changeable evening light. The meadow runs roughly east-west, so the setting sun sends its light along the meadow’s length. As the sunset develops, long shadows play across the landscape, interrupted by bits of warm light here and there.
I suspect that most people looking at this photograph may get a sense of calm and stillness. That’s not inaccurate, but photographing this ephemeral light is quite different from photographing more static subjects. In fact, I was working madly to grab this frame before the last bit of warm light on the trees was consumed by the encroaching shadows.
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“Funeral Range, Last Light” — The last direct light of the evening shines on the Funeral Range, Death Valley.
Am I the only person who has a set of odd little personal spots where they like to stop — places that others might pass by without noticing anything special? Over the years I’ve collected quite a few: a rock outcropping in Tuolumne Meadows, a bench at the high point on a local trail, a particular tree in the Central Valley, and this place in Death Valley National Park.
Years ago I turned off the road that passes through here and walked to the top of a small rise with my camera. There are no icons visible from the place, but it is in the middle of a portion of the immense, still, quiet space of this park. Something about it resonated with me, and I go there on every return trip. This time it was evening when I arrived, and I photographed the very last sunlight of the day on the Funeral Mountains.
“Evening Dunes, Desert Mountains” — The day’s last light on sand dunes backed by the Kit Fox hills and base of the Grapevine Mountains.
What trip to Death Valley would be complete without at least one morning or evening wandering sand dunes and photographing them? Although this visit was focused on the ephemeral appearance of Lake Manly, I still found some time for more familiar subjects. On my final evening in the park I went to these well-known dunes just before sunset, planning to photograph the dunes, the lengthening shadows, the warm light, and distant desert mountains.
There are a lot of little bits of knowledge about these dunes that are useful if you are going to photograph them. Here the sunset light disappears a bit earlier than you might expect since long shadows move across the valley as the sun drops behind mountains in the west. There’s only a brief interval between very bright direct sun and the arrival of the shadows — so it is important to arrive earlier than you might think and to then be ready to act quickly.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
A final beam of sunset light falls across groves of Eastern Sierra aspen groves on an autumn evening.
This is one of those locations that I feel like I should have been done with years ago. It is a somewhat iconic spot with easy access, and I have photographed it many times. But this year’s color transition seemed to follow a different trajectory than I have seen before — perhaps due to the preceding wetter-than-normal year or possibly related to relatively quiet autumn weather. In any case, it seemed like high elevation color came a bit later and overlapped the lower elevation transition more than usual. As a consequence, the color here was unusually interesting during the third week of October, so I reserved an evening to go there and photograph once again.
My plan was pretty simple. I would first visit a nearby area where I expected to find lots of bare trees, and after finishing there I would get myself in position for this location well before the best light arrived. The plan worked, and I photographed these and other nearby groves in the low angle light before the sun dropped below the Sierra crest. As more and more of the scene fell into shadow I began to think of packing up and moving on… but then I saw this one final beam of light slanting across the groves. I had literally only seconds to frame the scene, configure the camera, and make three exposures before the light was gone. In the first the beam was too bright, in the third it was nearly gone… but the middle exposure worked.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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