A small tree grows from the side of a boulder near the shoreline of a subalpine back-country lake in Yosemite National Park.
This little tree seems like an impossibility. In a tiny crack in a very large boulder, some distance from the shore in this subalpine lake, it somehow manages to live and seemingly even thrive. It is hard to imagine a more difficult place for a tree to grow. It is also difficult, though interesting, to imagine what this tree might look like if it manages to succeed in the long-term and live for perhaps a hundred years or more. Will it get to the point that its roots begin to grow out of the small crack and spread across more of the rock, and might it form a small pocket of soil that supports other smaller plants?
I made the photograph in the morning, when the light of the early sun was just coming over a ridge above and to the right of the tree. It slanted across the top of the boulder and picked off the upper portion of the tree, leaving its lower truck and the face of the boulder in shade.
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
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.
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
Morning mist rises above a high desert pond reflecting the lower slopes of the eastern Sierra Nevada near McGee Creek.
On the second morning of my first fall color to the eastern Sierra this autumn, having been less than astonished by this year’s color so far, I decided to head instead out into Owens Valley to shoot back toward the mountains and to shoot some subject in Owens Valley itself. I started at this little lake a few miles east of highway 395, where great reflections of the range lit by morning sun area often seen. This photograph looks across the small lake towards McGee Creek Canyon. (McGee Creek isn’t a bad place to look for aspen color…)
I arrived here before sunrise and was set up and ready to go before the first light hit the peaks in the area of Mt. McGee and Mt. Morgan. As I stood (freezing!) by the shore of this small lake, waiting for the light that I knew was coming, a truck came up the lonely road to this place, passed the pond, made a u-turn, and slowed down by my vehicle, which was parked along the main road. My first thoughts were “this is either another photographer or someone who is checking out my car… for purposes I don’t want to think about.” However the vehicle kept going. A few moments later I discovered that this was a photographer, and he and his dog took up a position along the far shoreline. A few days later I was looking through an online landscape photography forum and I came across a photograph that looked like it had been shot from about that photographer’s position, and in which the conditions looked darn near identical to what I saw that morning. I contacted the photographer and found out that, indeed, he was the person I had seen that morning. (If you wonder why we didn’t touch base on the scene… a) we were both busy shooting the entire time, b) we were on opposites sides of the lake, and c) even though I yelled a greeting he didn’t hear.)
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 and Amazon.
Afternoon storm clouds clear from the sunset sky above Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon, Yosemite National Park.
With this photograph I get to tell another of the “serendipitous photograph” stories that seem to keep coming up in my work. In this case, we had been camped near the lake in the lower area of the photograph for several days, getting to know the place and having time to carefully photograph various areas nearby. On a previous evening we had climbed to a second lake a few hundred feet higher than the “main” lake, from which one of our group decided to traverse a nearby slope. He ended up at another alpine lake that looked interesting, and the next morning others went with him to visit it. I didn’t, because I had some other things that I wanted to photograph in morning light and because I had a hunch that the light might turn out to be more interesting in the evening, mainly because the area of the lake was open to the west and, therefore, the evening light.
So in the evening, after our typical very early dinner, I departed on a walk to the upper lake that my friends had visited that morning, wandering around “our” lake and through the surrounding forest to pick up a rocky ramp that ascended toward the lake. However, I apparently missed a turn somewhere. I finished the main part of the climb and apparently should have turned left immediately – but I continued on straight ahead and soon found myself in a little meadowy area with a rather steep bunch of rocks between me and my goal. I finally found a circuitous route up a series of ramps, but now it was getting too close to sunset and my turn-around time, so I had to retrace my steps without getting to the lake.
I returned to the small meadow and made a few photographs there, then headed back toward the route by which I had ascended. Despite not making the lake, one of my main goals had been to get up high to photograph the surrounding terrain at sunset, especially since earlier in the day large thunderclouds had been building to the east and creating the possibility of some very special evening light. As I descended the upper part of the “ramp,” the pre-sunset colors started to light up and I quickly found a spot with a good vantage point to view this in several directions. Among the last photographs I made as the light started to fade was the series including this image. (It is actually a composite of two exposures – one for the very bright and saturated clouds and another for the darker shadows down near that lake.) Beyond the lake is the left end of rocky Shepherds Crest and even further in the distance is Virginia Canyon and then the Sierra crest.
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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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