Lake, Ridges, Evening Light. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Mountaintop trees stand above a sub-alpine lake, dome, and ridge in evening light, Yosemite National Park.
This photograph (and its appearance here) is a bit unusual for me, though not entirely unprecedented. It is a photograph that I have shared previously, back when I originally made it some years ago. During the last year and a half I have had plenty of opportunities to revisit older work. Mostly this has meant exploring raw file archives to locate work that was “left behind,” but which turned out to be interesting and valuable in retrospect — photographs that I felt deserved a first showing. But this case represents something different — the rethinking of a photograph that I thought I had finished.
Revisiting and revising one of my previously-shared photographs usually leads to some relatively obvious changes. But in this case I think that changes may be subtle. Theres a small change in how it is cropped, some new ideas about how to handle the foreground light, some important but small changes to the middle forest and peak just beyond the lake, and some new adjustments to the sky. In my view, it is perfectly natural and good to revisit the original interpretation of a photograph over time, a process that was perhaps more common in the film era.
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.
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