Tag Archives: pine

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

Trees and Granite Cliffs

November 10, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Trees ascend rocky slopes to the base of steep granite cliffs, Tuolumne River Canyon, Yosemite National Park.

There are still a few more photographs to be found among those I made during my weeklong mid-September backpack into the Yosemite back-country. I spent several days photographing in the Glen Aulin area and this is one more of the photographs from that area. In the evening the sun sets down canyon from Glen Aulin, and we had travelled to a spot where we could see down into the upper reaches of the canyon as the sun set. While I was photographing some closer subjects, I looked up and saw the light from the west back- and side-lighting trees at the upper edge of the forest before it gives way to steep granite cliffs.

One of the great pleasures of this trip was having the opportunity to spend a number of days in each location. We spent three days in this area at the start of the trip and I had the better part of two additional days on the way back to my car. In many cases, I might initially wonder how I could possibly spend that many days shooting one small area within walking distance of my camp. But many days later I had discovered more and more potential subjects… and I almost felt like I was running out of necessary time!

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Lone Tree, Autumn Snow

October 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning sun shines on a lone tree on a rocky ridge after early autumn snow storm dusted the upper reaches of Bishop Creek Canyon, California.

This was the first clear morning after several days of early season snow in the Sierra Nevada. Earlier that morning I had driven the still unplowed road up to North Lake and photographed there for several (very cold!) hours, starting before sunrise. As the sun rose higher and I decided to drive back down the road, possibly to some lower elevation groves that are first hit by morning sun at a later hour. The road leaves North Lake and makes a few twists as it descends toward a long traverse of the hillside above the valley holding the town of Aspendell.

As I crossed this section of the road, two things happened. First, and somewhat oddly for a semi-isolated gravel road on a snowy day, a number of vehicles came up the road at about this time. This forced me to pull out alongside the narrow road and allow them to pass – after which I watched several of them get stuck on the slippery road just above my pull-out point. This, of course, brought the traffic to a dead stop while the flat-landers figured out how to drive their fancy AWD (!) vehicle on snow. Second, as I stopped here I caught sight of this interesting tree slightly below and off to the side of the traverse, on a hill still covered with fresh snow and backed by the shaded talus slope on the other side of the valley. Being stuck for a few minutes anyway, it seemed like a fine idea to take the camera and tripod out again and photograph the tree while waiting!

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

Morning Light on Shoreline Trees

October 3, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Early morning light illuminates shoreline trees, meadows and rocks at McCabe lake, with talus and forest-covered slopes beyond, Yosemite National Park.

We were camped at this lake for several days, and by this morning I had developed a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to photograph at different times of the day. My main interest in the early morning was in shooting almost straight back into the sun as it rose above the ridges to the east and began to backlight the lodgepole pines around the lake, especially those along the rocky and meadowy shoreline on the west and south sides. So on this morning, my second-to-last at this lake, I was up reasonably early and off to the other side of the lake before sunrise.

Once I reached the other side of the lake I had two tasks in mind. One was to make a few photographs in the very soft light before the sun reached this area. The other was to find and remember several compositions that might well work when the sun actually arrived. Around the west end of the lake I found several that lined up some of the small shoreline peninsulas and the rocks along the shoreline. After photographing those low light subjects for a while, I noticed that the light was beginning to strike a few trees along the west end of the lake, so I quickly got back in position to start doing the photographs as the sun began to arrive.

This morning presented one slightly unusual shooting challenge. For so late in the season there were a lot of bugs flying around the edges of the lake, including a surprising number of mosquitos. Unfortunately, the same light that so nicely picks up the edges of the backlit trees… also nicely highlighted all of the flying insects along the shoreline! These insects can show up in photographs as hundreds of small to larger blurring streaks – which must be laboriously and individually cloned out in post. Fortunately, I have a way to deal with this and make the process a little easier. I made two exposures of each composition, separated by a second or two. Since it was windless, the trees barely moved at all – but the bugs did move. Since their traces appear at different places in the two images, I can superimpose them in Photoshop and then mask out each bug in the upper image, substituting the corresponding bug free portion of the image from the layer below. It is still a bit of work, but not nearly as bad as trying to clone all of these problems out.

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

Trees and Granite Cliffs, Evening Light

September 30, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Evening sun backlights trees ascending granite slopes in front of cliffs, Yosemite National Park.

This is very similar to a photograph I posted very soon after returning from this trip about a week ago – the previous one was a portrait orientation variation on this landscape orientation version. The beautiful conjunction of trees, granite, and evening light occurred along the Tuolumne River in an area not far from where the river leaves is wide and relatively flat and peaceful path through sub-alpine meadows and enters a canyon that gradually becomes steeper and deeper as it leads to the unfortunate obscenity of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. (I visited that location this summer for the first time in many year, and I found it to be the saddest place that I can ever recall visiting in the National Park System.)

But to leave that gloom and doom behind, this portion of the Tuolumne is spectacularly beautiful! Here the river begins to flow quickly and sometimes wildly across granite slabs, sometimes pausing to flow serenely in more level sections. As I was photographing other more intimate subjects above the river I happened to look up and see this beautiful late afternoon back-light shining through the trees that climbed up towards these folded granite ridges, with the haze-obscured vertical cliffs beyond.

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