Tag Archives: park

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Parking Lot Near Pier 48, Morning

July 15, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Morning light on a large parking lot near Pier 48, San Francisco.

Continuing with the “urban landscape” theme, this is a photograph of a parking lot south of the bridge next to ATT Park and near the buildings of Pier 48 in San Francisco. After getting off the train that arrived in San Francisco at 7:00 a.m. and wandering over to Townsend Street, I decided to cross the what I think must be the Mission Bay inlet and take a look through this area which was rather deserted at this early hour. (Come back here before a Giants game, and the parking lot will be completely full of the cars of people who are willing to spend exorbitant amounts to park here.)

While there were cars in other portions of this parking lot that are closer to likely destinations, at this far end there was a single lonely car, and that seemed like it could be an anchor for a photograph of the lot, the tall streetlight poles, the industrial-looking buildings of Pier 48 and other assorted waterfront things. Because it was so early, the sun rising across the bay was filling the air with brilliant light that created a sky that was more white than blue.

In addition to the obvious crop, this image required other kinds of substantial work in post. The first issue was controlling the very brightest parts of the sky and a second was the follow-up need to then lighten a few other areas to get some detail back into the image. Color balance was a tricky thing – this isn’t that far from what the raw file contained, though I did warm the colors just a bit. I also did something in this image that I rarely do, namely use semi-opaque blurred and desaturated overlay layer of the original image to do, well, some stuff that is a bit hard to describe in written form. Suffice it to say that this had an effect on the parking lot and on the brightness of the sky.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Rocky Shoreline, Lower Young Lake

July 12, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

Morning light shines through the forest on the rocky shoreline of Lower Young Lake, Yosemite National Park.

The three Young Lakes are among my favorite places in the Yosemite back-country, and I visit them pretty much every summer. As I did when I made this photograph, I most often to in the last season – I like to visit after Labor Day weekend, when the crowds begin to diminish, the weather is a bit cooler, fall colors begin, and everything in the Sierra seems to slow down in anticipation of the coming winter.

On this visit I camped for something like three nights at the lower lake, and thus had time to photograph throughout the basin at different times of day. On this morning I got up early as I usually do, and spent a good part of the morning photographing along the shoreline of this lake, starting in the area near where most people camp and where the trail passes along the shoreline. A bit later I crossed the outlet stream and followed the rocky shoreline around to the far shore where the forest opens into rocky meadows near the main inlet stream.

In the photograph, the early light is coming from behind the trees in the shoreline forest and glancing off the tops of the boulders on the shore and in the shallow water. There were two photographic challenges in making this photograph. First, the dynamic range between the brightest sunlit spots on the rocks and the darker areas in the forest is extreme. In some cases I might resort to blending multiple exposures as a way to deal with this issue, but here I was able to recover enough detail from a single frame. The second issue relates to the color of the light. Specifically, while the sunlit areas have a fairly warm quality, the light in the shadows on the rocks and in the shaded areas of the forest turns out to be distinctly blue in a photograph. In fact, these areas end up looking much more blue than you would think if you were there – this has to do with the way our minds process what we see to make it more like what we think it should be… if that makes any sense. In any case, the decisions here ended up being about how much blue would be the right amount.

(Basic EXIF data is available by “mousing over” large images in blog posts. Leave a comment if you want to know more.)

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

Late Afternoon, Tenaya Lake

July 8, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Ice covers the surface of Tenaya Lake on the day of the mid-June opening of Tioga Pass Road as afternoon clouds cluster around the summit of Mount Conness, Yosemite National Park.

After the wild sunset-illuminated versions of this scene that I’ve posted recently, I thought it might be a relief to post something more subtle! This photograph was also made on the evening of June 18, the day that Tioga Pass Road opened for the 2011 season. A bit earlier I had photographed along the shoreline of Tenaya Lake – the ice-covered area in the lower portion of this image – where I had juxtaposed melting ice, deep blue water, and interesting clouds. When I finished there I had a decision to make – whether to head back up toward the pass, continue to photograph around the lake, or try to get a shot of Mount Conness from Olmsted Point. Since I had been in contact with a client concerning Mount Conness photographs just a few days earlier, I decided to try that third choice.

When I arrived at Olmsted, conditions were a bit unpromising. Clouds had come up over the Sierra crest and Conness was completely obscured. In addition, a certain type of gloomy haze and cloudiness was taking much of the energy out of the scene. Clouds to the west were washing out the light, too. Many times I don’t give up immediately in situations like this, at least not until I’ve spent a bit of time trying to get a sense of where things might be headed. (Ultimately on this evening that turned out to be a good decision, as near sunset one of the most intense displays of Sierra evening color occurred… but that it a story I’ve already told in earlier posts.) As I watched, the clouds around Conness began to move a bit and every so often a bit of the tip of the mountain would poke through. During one of these moments, a bit of light filtered through the high clouds from the west and glanced across the slopes of Polly Dome and struck the upper reaches of Medlicott Dome.

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

Trees and Sunset Sky, Olmsted Point

July 7, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trees growing on granite silhouetted against a colorful sunset sky at Olmsted Point, Yosemite National Park.

This astonishing, magical light occurred just at and right after sunset on the evening of June 18, the day that Tioga Pass finally opened for the 2011 summer season. I earlier posted a vertical format photograph of much the same scene, though with slightly different light – the other photograph was made about a minute after this one and the conditions were changing very rapidly.

The photograph was made from the popular Olmsted Point overlook along the Tioga Pass Road (highway 120), with its well-known view of subalpine Tenaya Lake. Since I have recounted the story of this light in some detail in an earlier post, I’ll keep this description somewhat short, but here is the genera outline. Earlier in the evening I had come here to try to photograph Mount Conness with a long lens. Initially the light was very unpromising, but I observed some things that suggested the possibility of sunset light so I stuck around. Just before sunset, as the sun dropped near the horizon to the west, the light came from below to illuminate the thin, high clouds and produce an amazing color show.

To make the series of photographs of these trees I simply pivoted my tripod around from the direction it had been pointing, towards Mount Conness. The trees are somewhat sparse here since the granite domes and slabs cannot support many of them. The speed of light and color transition was remarkable. At one or more points, as the clouds picked up the sunset glow, the brightness of the light suddenly increased noticeably. The brightest color moved across the sky from east to west, and here the color was just beginning to diminish ever so slightly overhead as it continues to intensify to the west and closer to the horizon.

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