Tag Archives: lembert

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

Deer Graze Below Lembert Dome and Mount Dana, Tuolumne Meadows

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Deer Graze Below Lembert Dome and Mount Dana, Tuolumne Meadows - Deer graze in the early evening in Tuolumne Meadows below Lembert Dome and Mount Dana, Yosemite National Park.
Deer graze in the early evening in Tuolumne Meadows below Lembert Dome and Mount Dana, Yosemite National Park.

Deer Graze Below Lembert Dome and Mount Dana, Tuolumne Meadows. Yosemite National Park, California. July 11, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Deer graze in the early evening in Tuolumne Meadows below Lembert Dome and Mount Dana, Yosemite National Park.

Although compressed here by the use of the telephoto lens, this view of Tuolumne Meadows, Lembert Dome, and Mount Dana is one of the first that you might see when arriving at the Meadows from the west – at least if you happen to look towards Dana after dropping to the meadow and rounding the first gentle curve to the left past a group of trees that grows along the roadside and at the edge of the meadow. This alignment of Lembert and Dana is one that I always look for when I arrive.

Perhaps because I often see it when I arrived at Tuolumne, and because I most often arrive in the morning, my mental image of this view usually includes haze that makes the view of Dana opaque, especially in when the haze is back-lit by this morning light. Oddly, I don’t often look across the meadows from this point of view during the evening, when I suppose I’m more likely to be further up the meadow and closer to the Tuolumne River itself. On this July evening, however, I did happen to be here just before sunset. (I don’t recall for sure, but I’ll bet that I was returning from photographing somewhere to the west.) When I saw that familiar alignment of Lembert and Dana in the evening light, I stopped. I don’t think that I noticed the herd of deer along the meadow at the bottom of the frame until I was set up.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Tuolumne River, Alpenglow

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Tuolumne River, Alpenglow - The Tuolumne River curves through Tuolumne Meadows as alpenglow colors that landscape, Yosemite National Park.
The Tuolumne River curves through Tuolumne Meadows as alpenglow colors that landscape, Yosemite National Park.

Tuolumne River, Alpenglow. Yosemite National Park, California. July 7, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The Tuolumne River curves through Tuolumne Meadows as alpenglow colors the landscape, Yosemite National Park.

I have written previously about several topics that connect to this photograph. For one, I have described a certain type of atmospheric condition in the Sierra that may bring astonishingly intense evening colors when clouds above the mountains end to the west of the range, allowing the final sunset light to illuminate the clouds from beneath. On this evening it looked like all the pieces were in place for such a show, but I know that while these conditions make the light possible, they do not guarantee it – and on this evening there was a wonderful, subtle glow just after sunset… but not the imagined overwhelmingly brilliant light.

For another, I have written about scoping out a shot ahead of time, sometimes earlier the same day and sometimes weeks, months, or even years earlier. Earlier on this day I decided to take a walk in the meadow without my camera gear, with precisely the task of “scoping out” in mind. I wandered around somewhat aimlessly, following my nose this way and that to investigate lots of interesting things and places that I might have passed by on a more purposeful hike. Before heading back to camp for an early dinner I had selected three possible subjects that I thought might work well.

I have also written about how little control we have over our subjects when shooting landscape. We can anticipate and guess and be fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right gear and the skill to know how to use it, along with the ability to see what is happening – but in the end, in many ways, we take what we can find and work with it. When I arrived back in the evening an hour or so before the time of interesting light, I had a feeling that the first subject I had seen earlier might be the most promising. This was a scene that placed Lembert Dome between a couple of groups of trees and a bit of the river when viewed from the middle of a footbridge crossing the Tuolumne. I arrived and set up and began the planned wait for what I hoped would be very interesting light. However, as sunset approached, I could see that the shot I had planned was not going to work in the light that I found myself working with. So, on the spur of the moment and acting essentially intuitively, I picked up the tripod and camera and moved to a nearby spot and rather than making a tightly focused shot of the dome, I zoomed way out to include a gentle curve in the Tuolumne, a sandbar, and a line of foreground trees, and I made this photograph of the much subtler-than-expected post sunset light.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome

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Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome
Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome

Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome. Yosemite National Park, California. June 5, 2010. a© Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Glacial erratics and trees at the base of Lembert Dome, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park.

This photograph was made last spring in early June, when I drove over Tioga Pass on a quick one-day jaunt right around the time that the road was re-opened for the season after its annual winter closure. The road opened a bit later than usual in 2010 due to above average and late snow fall, and when I crossed there was as much or more snow than I recall seeing up there.

This was one of my marathon drive days. I started well before dawn in the San Francisco Bay Area and arrived in Yosemite in the very early morning and without any concrete plan – except that the ideas of visiting waterfalls and possibly getting up to Tioga Pass were on my mind. I did stop near the Valley first, where I made a series of photographs of Cascade Creek in virtually full flow. After doing this and making a very brief visit to the Valley, I decided to visit the high country along Tioga Pass road. I went just over the pass before turning back. There was so much snow still around that in most places it still looked much more like winter than like early June.

I finally started heading back to the west, as my plan was to return late to the SF Bay Area. As I left the pass and started down toward Tuolumne Meadows the light began to get “interesting” as the sun dropped lower in the west and some high clouds occasionally softened the light. As I drove past Lembert Dome I thought of photographing these glacial erratics that sit on the apron at the bottom of the dome before making one last stop to photograph snow-covered Tuolumne Meadow in the day’s last light.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Storm Cell Over Mount Dana, Sunset

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Storm Cell Over Mount Dana, Sunset
Storm Cell Over Mount Dana, Sunset

Storm Cell Over Mount Dana, Sunset. Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park, California. July 24, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An evening storm cell winds down over Mount Dana beyond Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park, California.

This is a wider view of a scene I photographed in late July on an evening when thunderstorm cells were floating around the Sierra Nevada crest east of Tuolumne Meadows. This cell had conveniently centered itself directly above and behind Mount Dana, the highest peak on this section of the crest right above Tioga Pass, and was dropping virga (rain that doesn’t make it to the ground) over the peak in the sunset light.

It seemed odd that I was the only photographer out in the meadow on this evening!

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.

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