Tag Archives: morning

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Morning Above The Meadow

August 17, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First light comes to ridges and peaks above a subalpine meadow

Nothing was yet open along Tioga Pass Road when I visited in late July. Typically all of the campgrounds would be open by this point, but an exceptionally heavy winter snowfall had delayed the process of clearing the road and opening up the high country. There was still a lot of snow at around 10,000′ and higher, and water was running high and fast everywhere. Early in the morning I drove back into the park from my camp site just east of the crest, heading down to Tuolumne Meadows to make some early morning photographs.

I’m often a bit surprised by how few people who camp at Tuolumne manage to make it out to the meadow for first light, missing what is arguably the most beautiful time of the day. On this day, with the campground closed, there was almost no one else at the meadow — I had the place almost entirely to myself. I stopped at the lower end of the meadow and looked back to the east, across the meadow and then a series of successive ridges, including a couple of well-known domes, and finally to the summit of Mount Dana. The sun had just risen on the east side of the range, and its light was beginning to pour over the ridges of the Sierra crest.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Morning Reflection

August 16, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The image of a shoreline forest is reflected in the still morning waters of a subalpine lake

Since the Tuolumne Meadows campground (along with everything else along Tioga Pass Road) was still not open during this late-July visit (in the aftermath of a very heavy snow year) I ended up camping at a forest service campground just outside the park. Since this place wasn’t ideally located for photography I ended up doing a fair amount of driving — down 120 towards Mono Lake and nearby areas, or back up 120 into the park. On this morning my pre-dawn drive took me over the pass, into the park, and down through the virtually deserted Tuolumne Meadows area.

I continued on along this road, eventually arriving this popular lake to find it deserted at this early hour. Later in the morning the hordes would arrive here, but in the very early morning I had it to myself. The water was almost still as I set up my camera, with the tiniest bit of mist floating above its surface. I made a couple of exposures, and suddenly the reflections were broken up as breezes began to stir the surface of the lake.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Lake and Mountain, Morning

August 15, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dawn light comes to mountain slopes above a reflecting High Sierra backcountry lake

I woke up early on the third and final morning of this pack trip — not early by photographic standards, but just before dawn, nonetheless. The rest of my party — perhaps because they are not photographers — continued to sleep in for another hour or more as I crawled out of my tent, gathered up my (downsized for this trip) camera equipment, and wandered off to see what I could see.

The sun had still not quite risen as I came to the top of a small hill above the lake, but very soon its light began to touch the highest peaks and stream across the shoulder of the large peak towering above the opposite shoreline of the lake. Sometimes the scale of a subject such as this mountain seems more obvious to me when I choose to not include all of it, so I chose to crop tightly enough to not show the peak — or the relatively uninteresting plain blue sky above it. (My theory is that a photograph framed so that the entire subject isn’t visible can sometimes produce an impression that the subject is so large that it cannot be contained within the frame.) As I made this exposure the first light was hitting the rocky face of the upper slopes of the mountain, and that light was reflected in the undisturbed early morning surface of the lake.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Dawn Reflections

August 12, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The quiet morning surface of a subalpine lake reflects the slopes of a Sierra Nevada mountain

In early August I had the opportunity to join a group of friends for a brief backpack trip up to the Sierra Crest in the Hoover Wilderness Area along the northeastern Yosemite boundary. We packed a lot of variety into a short trip — starting at the lower end of an east side canyon and culminating along the still-snowy crest, experiencing typical Sierra summer blue sky and hours of heavy rain, seeing beautiful wildflower displays fed by strong run-off streams, and dealing with the inevitable clouds of mosquitos. This wasn’t primarily a photographic expedition for me, but almost any backcountry travel is going to include some photography, so I carried a smaller and lighter kit that still allowed me to photograph a few things.

I made this photograph very early in the morning. The rest of my group did not share my early morning habits, so when I got up and left my tent before dawn I was alone. I walked to the top of a nearby promontory from which I could overlook the lake and its surroundings as the first light arrived. I am always struck by the immense quiet and stillness found in such places in the very early morning. The air was still and the lake’s surface smooth — no one else was yet out and about, and nothing was moving aside from an occasional fish rising to feed. As the sun slowing spread across the shoulder of the peak on the other side of the lake I photographed for nearly an hour before returning to camp, where my hiking partners were just beginning to stir.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: morning

Morning Above The Meadow

Morning Reflection

Lake and Mountain, Morning

Dawn Reflections

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