Tag Archives: rock

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

Trees in Silhouette, Olmsted Point, Sunset

June 29, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Trees at Olmsted Point are silhouetted against a brilliantly colorful spring sunset sky, Yosemite National Park.

I think everyone should occasionally get to post a just plain gaudy color sunset – and this is mine. While photographing Mount Conness from Olmsted Point was my primary goal on this evening, I also had some opportunities to swing the tripod around and point at other things from time to time. This is about as close as I can come to capturing the nearly hallucinogenic color of the sky as the brightest cloud illumination was centered directly overhead and beginning to move off to the west.

The color saturation was so intense that I had to under expose this by at least a stop in order to avoid blowing out the red channel and in order to retain some differentiation among the various shadings of color as they transitioned from very pink/red through orange and purple and on towards blue.

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

Spring Cascade, Polly Dome

June 22, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

A seasonal spring cascade falls across the granite face of Polly Dome, Yosemite National Park.

I know that the chance to see the high country in winter-like conditions is part of what draws people to the opening of Tioga Pass Road, especially after a heavy snowfall season like this one. But for me the water is at least as much of a draw. The high country comes alive in ways that are not seen during the rest of the year. Because of the long and warmer days, the rate of snow melt accelerates, and when the snowpack is as deep as it is this year, that sets loose an amazing amount of meltwater.

I find full-flowing creeks in places where I didn’t even realize that water flowed. Creeks become raging torrents that threaten to jump their banks. In many places they do rise high enough to flood large expanses of meadow. Seasonal water falls and cascades appear almost everywhere you look.

I spotted this slender cascade high on the granite slopes of Polly Dome, above Tenaya Lake. My first idea was to make a photograph in which a longer stretch of the fall would appear, dropping perhaps several hundred feet. But as often happens, the more I worked this scene the more I wanted to eliminate extraneous material – and I ended up shooting at 400mm to edit out as much of the surround as I could.

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

Alpenglow, Mammoth Peak

June 9, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Alpenglow lights the face of Mammoth Peak beyond a small tarn near the summit of Tioga Pass, Yosemite National Park.

This was very close to the last exposure I made on this productive late-July day last year. After photographing for a few hours in the vicinity of Tioga Pass, I ended up right at the pass as the day came to an end. Braving hordes of mosquitos – comes with the territory! – I worked the area around the pass itself, building compositions out of juxtapositions of the water in the small meltwater ponds, shoreline meadow and boulders, grasses growing along the edge of the water, the surrounding pine forests, and the more distant peaks of Kuna Crest. In this photograph, what is very nearly the very last direct light of the day is bathing the slopes of Mammoth Peak, which still had a fair amount of snow on its flanks even in late July.

This scene posed a few technical challenges. First, there is obviously a great distance between the foreground granite boulder and the very distance mountain. I wanted the foreground to be in optimal sharpness, so I used a relatively small aperture to maintain sufficient sharpness on the far ridge. There was also a fairly large dynamic range in the scene, ranging from soft but direct light on the snow fields of the peak to the dark areas within the forest on the other side of the pond. I wasn’t certain that I’d be able to handle the full dynamic range in one exposure, so I made three – one longer exposure to get a bit more light from the shadows and another shorter one on the dark side to avoid blowing out the brighter areas of the sky. In post, I discovered that there was enough detail in the shadows that I could get everything I needed from a single exposure, though I had to do some work with curves to get create an image the conforms more closely to the way I saw the scene at the time.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Mammoth Peak Reflected in Tioga Tarn

May 30, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 6 Comments

Mammoth Peak in sunset light, reflected in the still surface of Tioga Tarn, Tioga Pass, Yosemite National Park.

This view of Mammoth Peak on Kuna Crest in the Yosemite High Country from the Tioga Tarns at the top of Tioga Pass is a classic Sierra Nevada scene. The foreground tarns are lush green in the early summer after the snow melts out and fall into shadow early in the evening as the sun drops behind the ridge between this area and Gaylor Lakes. Mammoth Peak, however, has an almost unobstructed line of sight to the west, so this peak continues to hold the sunset light until the last possible minute. (Don’t let the peaceful appearance of the scene fool you – I was being devoured by clouds of mosquitos as I made these exposures.)

In order to deal with the extremely large dynamic range between the Mammoth Peak snow fields in direct sun and the very dark shadows of the nearby forest I resorted to exposure blending and a few other post-processing techniques. With exposure blending, I make two exposures, one optimized for the brightest areas of the scene and the second a slightly longer exposure to capture a bit more of the shadow detail. In post I began with the darker frame, since that presented Mammoth Peak the way I remembered it. Then I placed to other exposure beneath it and used a mask layer to reveal some of the lighter areas from the lower layer.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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