Tag Archives: light

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

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

December 7, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Photographers Charles Cramer and Karl Kroeber working in golden hour light along the shore of a sub-alpine lake high in the Sierra Nevada back-country of Yosemite National Park.

Look! A photograph of people! :-)

I spent a week or so on the trail in the Yosemite back-country with a group of five other photographers this past September. We spent a good stretch of time in the area of some scenic lakes in the northeastern portion of the park. I was out for a week and a day, while the rest of the group spent a few additional days on the trail. Not too long after arriving at the nearby sub-alpine lake that was to be our home for several days, various members of the group started to explore the surrounding area, and on this evening we all decided to climb up the valley from “our” lake to the next higher lake along the drainage. We travelled more or less cross-country up the shallow valley of the creek between the two lakes, passing through beautiful meadows before arriving along the shore of this lake very late in the afternoon.

Once we arrived we more or less split up and focused on different portions of the lake and its surroundings. I mostly shot in one very small area where some beautiful granite boulders were embedded in the shoreline meadow, providing an interesting foreground for photographs across the lake to a nearby peak as the golden hour light arrived. At one point I noticed that my friends Charlie Cramer and Karl Kroeber were shooting nearby, so I paused from my landscape photography to pivot my camera in their direction and make a photograph of them as they worked the golden hour light.

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

Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake

December 6, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Morning light on the trees, boulders, and grasses of a sub-alpine Sierra Nevada lake, Yosemite National Park.

On the morning after my hike up to this lake we were all up early and eager to explore the surrounding area. Everyone rose well before sunrise, and we headed off in various directions for our first morning of exploration and to start shooting. I began in the forest, looking for some corn lily plants and then various snags and fallen trees, but I eventually ended up along the shoreline of the lake. A lake like this one has almost limitless subjects to photograph. I began working the edge of the lake by photographing a few shoreline trees, then moved on to photograph some large boulders in the lake not far from the shore. As I moved clockwise along the edge of the water I began to pick up one of my favorite subjects – trees back-lit by morning light – and I worked to find a few compositions that spanned the bright foreground rocks and grasses, the middle distance shoreline trees, and then the more distant and shaded talus slopes leading to overhead ridges.

There were six of us in the group, and it was interesting to observe the different ways we each worked. Everyone was up pretty early, but for the most part each photographer headed off to look for his own special subjects. Occasionally we would run into one another, but we most often took pains to not try to re-do one another’s shots. Some among us immediately began to explore a bit more widely, heading around the lake and into the forest along the far shore, while others started very close to our campsite and slowly began to expand their circle of subjects. Over the course of a number of days we all got to know the lake and its surroundings much better – there is nothing like staying in one place for three or four days to reveal it in more depth than might be apparent on a short overnight visit.

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

Trees, Granite, and Afternoon Haze

November 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late afternoon sun back-lights haze around trees growing on granite domes along the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park.

I’m a big fan of shooting almost straight into the sun, especially when haze is involved and even more so when backlit trees can be the subject. This photograph was made in essentially these very backlit conditions, with the direct sun just a bit above and to the side of the scene. I liked the way that the near tree’s branches had more presence in front of the haze-faded low contrast background of the nearby ridge with trees and the further ridge fading into the bright haze.

I posted a slightly different version of this scene last week – one in which I had placed the tree almost directly in the center of the frame. Although some will cite some “rule of composition” to disallow that sort of composition, I think that the rules don’t make a lot of sense if your way of applying them is to simply follow them slavishly. I consider them to be more like “observations about composition” than rules of composition. It isn’t that placing a subject in the center of the frame is wrong, it is just that doing so can have a very different effect than putting it along an edge, one-third of the way in from a corner, at the bottom or top of the frame, and so forth. It is more important to get a sense – either intuitive or analytical – of the effects might be of these different placement options. In any case, I liked the centered composition of the other version – centered compositions can have a certain kind of calm strength, and the centering perhaps focused a bit more attention on the tree and a bit less on the background.

At the same time, I like this more “tradition” composition that places the tree a bit off-center to the right side of the frame. In a way, this opens up the frame a bit and I think it gives the middle ridge and its trees a bit more presence. I think it also allows the viewer to see the subtle light on those middle distance trees a bit better. And speaking of that part of the scene… I made a mistake at the time of exposure. With the sun almost in the field of view of the lens, I had to shield the front of the lens from the sun – but in this image I apparently missed a bit since I found a fairly obvious reddish flare in part of the frame. I’m glad to say that by a combination of color balance correction, some control over saturation, and a bit of work with a curve…. I think that I have managed to make the flare go away!

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

Tuolumne River Below Glen Aulin, Morning

November 27, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Early light on morning clouds above the Tuolumne River Canyon below Glen Aulin, Yosemite National Park.

This is the same bend in the Tuolumne River, located below Glen Aulin and before the river descends toward Waterwheel Falls and eventually the abomination of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, that was shown in a photograph of late afternoon light that I posted here a few days ago. This time it was early morning. We had been up well before sunrise and had wandered off in various directions to find early morning photographic subjects. My main goals were the cascading water along the edge of this section of the river (a bit of which is visible in the lower portion of the frame) and a granite bowl to the right of this view. As I came over the rise above this area before descending I saw the beautiful sparse clods to the west, probably extending to the edge of the Sierra and still with pastel colors from dawn light.

A technical observation about this photograph. This scene presented a technical challenge in the form of an extremely wide dynamic range between the bright and red-saturated first direct sunlight on the ridge at upper left and the much darker areas of forest in shade along the river and in the foreground. With a digital exposure, in a scene like this one, the primary rule for me is “don’t blow out the highlights.” If I had overexposed the sky the clouds would have turned into pure white, texture-free blotches and that bit of early sun on the rocks would have lost detail and taken on a very strange coloration. However, an exposure that protects the highlights in a scene like this one can leave the shadows nearly black. While it is possible to “fix” that a bit in post, the result is not necessarily very good when the dynamic range is very large. One “traditional” solution would have been to use a graduated neutral density filter (or “GND”) that blocked some of the brightest areas at the top of the frame while not affecting the lower 2/3 or so. But I don’t use them, and in this case the result would not have been totally wonderful since the same filtering that would reduce sky brightness would also make the large granite dome at the right end up nearly black at the top.

So instead of filtering at the time of exposure, I decided that I would use the roughly comparable, but more flexible, “exposure blending” techniques in post. With that in mind I made several photographs at different exposures – some at shorter shutter speeds to avoid the blown out highlights and others at increasingly slower shutter speeds to reveal the shadow detail that my eyes could see but which the camera otherwise could not. During the post-production phase, I selected two of the exposures, one that was as bright as possible but without blowing out the sky and sunlight, and the other two stops lighter to reveal that shadow detail in a way that seemed consistent with what I recall the scene actually looked like. The two source images were carefully adjusted during raw conversion and their two layers carefully aligned. With the darker image (the one with the “good” sky) on the top, I began to “paint” out the mask to reveal the details of the foreground forest, river, and rocks. (In answer to the expected question, this is not the same as HDR. That is a more or less automated process that works in a different way. Exposure blending is typically a manual process that relies a great deal on the photographers judgment and recall of the actual scene.)

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: light

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake

Trees, Granite, and Afternoon Haze

Tuolumne River Below Glen Aulin, Morning

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.