Tag Archives: pywiack

Last Light, Mount Conness

Last Light, Mount Conness
Last Light, Mount Conness

Last Light, Mount Conness. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The final evening alpenglow illuminates the summit ridge of Mount Conness and the west face of Medlicott Dome in the Yosemite National Park high country.

This will be my final photograph of Mount Conness from the evening of June 18, the day that Tioga Pass Road opened this year and the day of one of the most spectacular Yosemite high country sunsets in recent memory. It will be the final both in the sense that I think I’ve now shared the best of the group of images of this sunset and in the sense that it was literally my final exposure of the evening.

The short back-story is that what started out as a fairly unimpressive evening (at least in the photographic sense) transformed over a short period into something extraordinary as the sun dropped to the horizon west of the Sierra and illuminated the clouds from below, creating rare and very special alpenglow conditions over a wide area of the Sierra. (During the week that followed quite a few people commented on this amazing light, which they had witnessed from locations as distant as Mono Lake on the east side and the Central Valley to the west.)

When I made this photograph the show was coming to an end. At this point the sun had already set a few minutes earlier – the exposure was made around 8:45 p.m. – and the light was low enough to require a six-second exposure. While it may seem like Mount Conness (the tallest peak near the left on the skyline) and other features are receiving direct sunlight, this is actually the remaining post-sunset glow in the western sky.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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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.

Pywiack Dome, Tenaya Creek in Flood

Pywiack Dome, Tenaya Creek in Flood
Pywiack Dome, Tenaya Creek in Flood

Pywiack Dome, Tenaya Creek in Flood. Yosemite National Park, California. June 19, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pywiack Dome towers above Tenaya Creek as it floods surrounding meadows with spring snow melt, Yosemite National Park.

This little spot between Pywiack Dome and Tenaya Lake has interested me for some time. Driving past, I’ve been intrigued by the dome itself (of course!) but also by the small meadow below it where Tenaya Creek winds through a mixture of forest and meadow, and from which the outlet of Cathedral Lake is visible if you know just where to look. In the past, I’ve wandered about in this meadow a bit, trying to photograph lush growth of corn lily plants early in the season.

On this visit, as I drove by on the first day, I was struck by the amount of water flowing here – what I’m used to seeing as a meadow with a stream winding through it was filled from edge to edge with rushing water from snowmelt-swollen Tenaya Creek. I made a mental note to try to come back here the following morning when I thought that light might be interesting. And that’s just what I did on the second day of this visit during the weekend when the pass opened.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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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.

Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness

Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness
Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness

Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Clouds lit by alpenglow drift across the face of Mount Conness beyond the Tenaya Creek drainage, Yosemite National Park.

Earlier this week I posted another photograph of the same evening. This one was shot a bit earlier (believe it or not!) than the other photograph, as the intense and perhaps unexpected color display was just getting started. I’ll have more to write about the phenomenon in a future blog post that uses this evening as an example, but it almost seem like the sunset progressed backwards (oxymoron alert!) as it went on. It had begun with very boring and low contrast light, somewhat flattened by a haze that took on an increasingly ghastly blue-green hue as the light began to fade. Although the surroundings were spectacular on this opening day of Tioga Pass Road, the light and atmospheric conditions seemed to be conspiring to show them it their worst (literal and figurative) light.

But just at dusk a hint of pink appeared in some of the clouds ringing Mount Conness, the tall peak in the upper left. At first it was so faint that only those of us who were looking for it might have noticed, and we perhaps thought that we were simply trying to convince ourselves that something was going to happen. But the color increased, and as the more distant areas picked up better light, they shone through the foreground haze more clearly, and this haze faded in the same way that a scrim does in a theater when the front lights dim and the stage lights rise.

I find that this type of scene provides some of the most difficult technical and judgment challenges. So often the goal in an image, especially if it is going to be a print, is to try to get as much light into the scene as possible. A lot of the work in post-processing, at least for me, is done with the goal of trying to fill the image with light by means of various careful adjustments, often involving the use of masked curve layers. But here, the coloration depends upon not being overly bright – too much light either decreases the intensity of the pink and purple shadings or else sends them off into the land of the grotesque and gaudy. And the light in shadows – and there are a lot of shaded areas in this scene! – is very blue, much more so than the untrained eye would imagine when looking at the scene in person. This requires another set of tricky and subjective judgments – it would not look right to leave portions of the scene as blue “as they really were,” nor would it look right if the blue were diminished too much. But how much is right? There is no objective answer that I know of, so the goal (for example, on the large granite face of Polly Dome at the left) is to come up with a balance that seems blue enough but not too blue. A similar issue arises in these dark areas when it comes to deciding how bright is bright enough. Believe it or not, virtually nothing in this image is actually black, with the possible exception of a few very tiny areas in the lower left. The luminosity of the very dark areas had to be lifted a bit… but how much is just right? Again, a matter of personal judgment about which there is no objectively right answer.

All of that technical stuff aside, this evening provided one of the most glorious, albeit brief, displays of sublime light I have seen in the Sierra.

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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.

A Photograph Exposed: A Tale of Light

(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)

On the weekend of June 18-19 of this year I made a point of getting to Yosemite so that I could photograph the high country on the first day that Tioga Pass Road was open for the season. On a shoot like this, my subjects range from some that I planned to shoot ahead of time to some that were completely unanticipated. Among the many things that might affect my decisions is the light itself, and this is a story about that light… and perhaps a few other things, too.

I had driven to the park very early on Saturday morning and after photographing straight through the morning I finally made it over the pass and headed down to Lee Vining Canyon to find a campsite for that night. After getting up at 3:30 a.m. and driving to the Sierra from the SF Bay Area and then shooting all morning, I was exhausted! I pulled into the first available site, paid my fee, and promptly fell asleep in the car for perhaps an hour. When I woke up I set up my camp and at about 3:00 or so headed down to Lee Vining to get some “dinner” – on “photographer time,” dinner tends to either be very early or very late, and on this day I made it early so that I could be back up in the park well before the “good light” started.

Heading back up to Tioga Pass after my mid-afternoon dinner, I had a few subject ideas in mind. Tuolumne Meadows itself was one possibility, and I knew that I wanted to watch for any cascades or creeks that would be flowing in the spring snow-melt conditions. Tenaya Lake was another possibility, and a client’s interest in photographs of Mount Conness had me thinking about the possibility of a photograph from Olmsted Point that included ice-covered Tenaya Lake and this peak. Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: A Tale of Light