Four black oak trees with early autumn foliage stand in late-afternoon light at El Capitan Meadow, Yosemite Valley.
These four oak trees in El Capitan Meadow are almost iconic, having been photographed by many, many people. On this trip I stopped in El Capitan Meadow near the end of the day – this was my last major shooting location before leaving the Valley for the long trip back to the Bay Area. While there was considerably time left before sunset, because El Capitan Meadow sits to the east of some very tall cliffs, this photograph and others in the series were made just before the list direct light fell on the area. The fact that the areas closer to the cliff faces along the north side of the valley were already in shade helped set off the backlit leaves of the four trees.
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.
Thin morning ground fog floats above the dry autumn grasses of Ahwahnee Meadow below the granite cliffs of Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley.
During the cooler and wetter months of the year, ground fog often forms in the meadows of Yosemite Valley. Ahwahnee Meadow is one of the places I like to photograph these conditions, and since this was the morning after a damp and rainy day, I arrived here very early in anticipation of conditions that might produce the fog. It was very cold when I arrived, certainly below freezing by at least a few degrees. At first the fog was much denser and a bit deeper. I have photographs from this earlier pre-dawn period when a herd of deer passed through the meadow. Eventually, as the sun rose high enough that the light beams began to clear the mountains to the east of the Valley, the first light began to strike the upper slopes and walls of Glacier Point. As this happened and the air began to move and the temperature stopped dropping, the fog began to thin. This photograph was made shortly before the fog actually dissipated completely, and thin streamers of mist are broken up by clearer areas.
I have to admit that I do not know what the foreground plant is. (Hint: I won’t mind even a tiny bit if someone wants to write and tell me! :-) Cottony tufts are found at the top of long stems, growing out of odd shaped pods. I shot this with a very wide angle lens so that I could include some of this foreground foliage and the fill width of Glacier Point.
On a technical note, this image incorporates a blend of two exposures. Portions of the sky at the left side of the frame were very bright, while much of the rest of the scene was in shade and a lot darker. Almost the entire frame is from the 1/15 second exposure, but I have manually blended in a bit of the 1/40 second exposure in the area of cloudy sky at upper left in order to retain a bit of detail there. Also, though it should be obvious, this was shot with an ultra-wide angle lens – a 17mm focal length on a full frame DSLR. If you are at all familiar with this location in the Valley you will recognize that this is a bit of an unusual view.
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.
Morning light on trees in and around Ahwahnee Meadow, Yosemite Valley.
This little grove of trees might be one of the best known groves in Yosemite Valley. It sits apart from other trees out in Ahwahnee Meadow, and it can be an appealing site at various times of the year – in spring when the new leaves are bright green, in winter when the meadow and the trees may be snow-covered, and in fall. I made this photograph at the very end of October when the leaves had begun to change to fall colors and the meadow grasses had gone dormant. I had arrived here very early – before sun rise – and shot for a good hour or more in ground fog conditions. As the morning wore on the layer of fog thinned and finally disappeared completely just before I made this photograph. At about the same time, higher clouds around the rim of the Valley that had blocked the earlier light began to thin and the stronger light hit the meadow and the trees.
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.
Cattle graze in front of large aspen groves near Conway Summit, California.
Just about anyone who has every photographed aspens in the area around Lee Vining is probably familiar with this location – and I’ve certainly shot there quite a few times. From highway 395 the aspens extend west and up toward the peaks of the Sierra crest, and the at the right hour in the late afternoon the backlight can light up the leaves of the trees. When I visited this time the trees were in transition with some still green, others very colorful, and some almost leafless already. I was also lucky to have some clouds at the end of several cloudless days of photography. (Normal people like perfect blue sky, but photographers are not normal – we tend to like weather!) When I saw the clouds starting to form above the crest early in the afternoon I thought that something interesting might happen later near Conway so I made a point of heading that direction.
This photograph features, of all things, cattle – not my usual subject, perhaps! The area where these aspens grow seems to be at least as much a pasture as it is aspen groves, and I’ve seen cattle grazing in this spot before. (See comments for a note from a member of the family that owns the land.) As the clouds created shadows over the higher slopes in the background, for a moment the sun still hit the foreground trees and these cattle.
This shot also ties in with my recent post on using various focal lengths for landscape photography, in that this photograph was made with what some might regard as an unlikely landscape lens, a 100-400mm zoom! But in this case, this lens at 250mm was just what I needed to more tightly frame the bit of foreground pasture and sunlit trees and compress the distance between them and the shadowed hills beyond.
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.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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