Tag Archives: ridge

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

Sunset and Moonrise, Kuna Crest

August 15, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The nearly- full moon rises above the sunset light on Kuna Crest, Yosemite National Park.

Kuna Crest runs up Lyell Canyon between the Lyell and Dana forks of the Tuolumne River with the Sierra crest at one end and Mammoth Peak at the other. (Mammoth Peak is the large peak straight in front of you as you top Tioga Pass entering Yosemite National Park.) This ridge can catch great sunset light during the summer, and as I came down from the pass, heading back toward my camp at Porcupine Flat, and saw the almost full moon appearing over the shoulder of the ridge I decided to quickly stop and make a few exposures as the last light was about to leave the forest and soon after the peaks.

If you have tried photographing a scene that includes the moon in the early evening you know that the exposure is a tricky thing. The moon is lit by daylight, so it isn’t too surprising that the “correct” exposure for the moon is close to a normal daytime exposure. But that is not the right exposure for the rest of the scene, which turns out to be quite a bit darker than daylight at this time of day. In this scene things were even more complicates as the very saturated red colors on the ridge were quite “hot,” while the foreground meadow and forest was in shade and both darker and cooler in color. Basically, the dynamic range between the moon and the foreground was too large for a single exposure… so I made several.

At the time of exposure I thought that I might need as many as three component images in the final photograph – they would be one exposed for the bright ridge and sky, one exposed for the rather dark and shadowed foreground, and possibly a third that correctly exposed the moon. To be on the safe side I bracketed four exposures. When I began to work on the image I figured out that in this case I could construct a final “believable” image from two exposures if I was careful and could make some additional adjustments during post.

This is an example of a shot in which the use of a graduated neutral density filter could have been problematic, but where exposure blending could work very well. (“Exposure blending” is one term for the process of manually combining two component exposures using masked layers in Photoshop. No, it is not the same thing as HDR photography.) One of the things that would have been quite tricking using graduated neutral density filters is that the division between the brighter upper half and the darker lower half is not linear. Instead, the roughly follows the curved boundary between the lower meadow and dark trees and the still sunlit trees and the peak and sky.

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

Granite Domes and Trees, Morning

August 12, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Morning light on trees and glaciated ridges, Yosemite National Park.

It is now 11:23 p.m. PDT on Friday, August 12… and I just realized a few moments ago that I neglected to schedule the posting of a new photograph today! Before I left for Yosemite on this past Wednesday I thought I had placed a photograph in the queue for automatic posting today, but apparently not. As long as I complete this post in the next half hour or so, I won’t miss posting my daily photograph!

I made this photograph early today (Friday, August 12) as the first light was striking the glaciated ridges near Olmsted Point. I had arrived early enough to climb far up on the granite slopes above the famous overlook before the sun came up – I had a plan to photograph some of the solitary trees high on these granite slabs as the first light struck them. I accomplished that, and as I began to descend from this area I decided to make a few more photographs while I was up there. Across the nearby canyon is another ridge that is topped by the glacial erratics, the solitary boulders sitting on top of the rounded ridges and just about anywhere else in this part of Yosemite. The early light was coming across from the left and striking the tops of these ridges, but it had not yet struck the huge face of Clouds Rest, seen behind them.

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

Trees and Granite, Morning

August 6, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Morning light shines on the trees clinging to massive granite domes in the high country of Yosemite National Park.

I’ll write a bit less about this photograph since I posted it already in a color rendition and described some of the background of the image in that earlier post. The basic idea is that I used a very long focal length to isolate the single primary tree against a world of granite that recedes toward the rising sun that is above and out of the frame to the right.

When I made the photograph I had a pretty good idea that it might work as black and white. In fact, though I don’t recall for certain, I think I was leaning towards thinking of the scene in black and white when I made the exposure. (Those last two sentences must seem strange if not almost perverse to people whose primary background is in film!) Sometimes, as with this scene, I end up liking both versions, at least at first. While I may end up leaning toward one or the other more after I live with the prints a while, right now I go back and forth. Of course, when two things are different it is not necessarily the case that one must be better than the other; sometimes they are just different.

Oddly, one thing that inclined me towards black and white ends up also suggesting color. Because so much of the content of the frame is nearly monochromatic I think I originally felt that with so little color to work with that it might make sense to just let it be monochromatic. But then, “with so little color to work with,” the subtle effect of color begins, in some ways, to be even more important.

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

Trees and Granite, Morning

August 3, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Morning light shines on the trees clinging to massive granite domes in the high country of Yosemite National Park.

This photograph was the result of an odd little sequence of events. While driving along Tioga Pass Road in the afternoon I looked more closely at an area that I have passed by many times and noticed that it was filled with glacial erratics, “loose” boulders left behind when glaciers retreated. It seemed like these boulders might be an interesting subject and since they were in a position where morning light seemed likely, I made a mental note to return in the morning over the next couple of days and see what I could photograph here.

The next morning, after photographing at dawn nearby, I decided to go to this spot and see what I could come up with. I arrived without a specific idea in mind beyond the plan to look around and see what I could find. My first idea was to photograph the boulders themselves, and I did make a few mediocre exposures of individual boulders and groups of boulders. As I played around with this idea I noticed that the light slanting across granite slabs a bit to the north of me looked interesting, especially since this light was also side- and back-lighting some of the trees. So I turned my attention to this potential subject.

Working with this idea I gradually became less interested in the boulders and more interested in the trees of the lodgepole forest that extended beyond the slabs, so I found a somewhat higher spot to shoot from and made a series of exposures that included layers of backlit trees extending beyond the granite. Beyond the trees was the base of Pywiack Dome, a subject that I have worked with a number of times in the past. Now I looked a bit higher than the forest that led my eye to the dome, and I photographed the boundary between the forest and the base of the dome. (Producing, I might add, a really, really boring photograph!) Looking a bit higher I saw the solitary tree near the lower left of this photograph, and I made a vertical exposure that included mostly just the tree and the expanse of granite above and around it. (This photograph will be here in a few days.) They I thought I would try a landscape orientation photograph, and as I worked with this I got the idea to include the right face of the closer granite dome against the darker shape of a more distant cliff. And, finally, I found this photograph.

(There is also a black and white version of this photograph. The text accompanying that version talks a bit about the black and white versus color issue.)

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