Tag Archives: rush

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

Spring Torrent, Boulders, and Trees

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Spring Torrent, Boulders, and Trees - Spring snowmelt swells a rushing creek as it rushes past trees and over boulders, Yosemite National Park.
Spring snowmelt swells a rushing creek as it rushes past trees and over boulders, Yosemite National Park.

Spring Torrent, Boulders, and Trees. Yosemite National Park, California. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Spring snowmelt swells a rushing creek as it rushes past trees and over boulders, Yosemite National Park.

This is a Yosemite National Park cascade that I frequently photograph – at various times of the year including winter, the spring runoff season, and the much quieter and more sedate autumn time. This creek drops precipitously down a steep mountainside (as a number of Yosemite Valley creeks tend to do!) and passes in several place through narrow, twisting, and granite boulder-filled channels.

I made this photograph at almost right around the peak of the spring runoff during an above-average precipitation year, so the water was roaring though this section. The mist that is visible in the photograph was being blown strongly down the canyon and I had to stand in its flow to make this photograph. I recall that I more or less figured out the composition (two actually – one vertical and this one horizontal) before I moved into position, and then I quickly stepped into the mist and made a series of exposures before I and my equipment became too wet, shooting straight into the blowing mist. Now, when I look at this photograph, the memory of the cool, wet air and the tremendous sound of the cascading water comes back to me.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.

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

Mist, Trees, and Boulders – Cascade Creek

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Mist, Trees, and Boulders - Cascade Creek
Mist, Trees, and Boulders - Cascade Creek

Mist, Trees, and Boulders – Cascade Creek. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Mist and spray from spring runoff fill the air in the boulder-strewn canyon of Cascade Creek, Yosemite National Park.

Making this photograph was an “interesting” experience! I visited Cascade Creek on June 18, probably near the peak flow of the spring runoff season, and the creek was a full-blown torrent. After photographing some familiar rock formations below the bridge that crosses the creek, I decided to try a photograph from the upstream side of the bridge. In this direction, the creek is more or less half waterfall and half cascade as it plunges down a very steep and narrow section of the hillside. The whole scene was in deep shade and mist and spray filled the air.

I made a guess that a 135mm lens might give me a tight enough framing of the scene, so I briefly stepped away from the creek and the spray-filled air to switch lenses. Leaving everything else behind, I took the camera, tripod, and this single prime lens and walked to the wet side of the bridge. There was enough spray that I and my gear began to get wet pretty fast, so I worked quickly. I got everything in what I figured would be about the right position before I uncovered the lens, then quickly uncovered and finalized the composition and manually focused. I knew that I couldn’t really stay in this spray all that long so I spent a couple minutes bracketing a series of exposures as the mist surrounded me, hoping that water on the lens and in the air in front of the camera would not interfere with the shot.

The main decision was about shutter speed and with other decisions regarding aperture and so forth to follow on that. The idea was to use a slow enough shutter speed to allow the water to blur a bit, but not so slow as to turn it to formless mist. I managed to get to a 1/5 second exposure by shooting at f/20, an aperture a bit smaller than I would typically want to use, as apertures smaller than about f/16 can begin to introduce a bit too much diffraction blur. But in a shot like this one where mist is obscuring a great deal of the detail anyway, that seemed like a reasonable compromise that let me lengthen the shutter speed just a bit.

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.

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

Impossible Tree Falls

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Impossible Tree Falls
Impossible Tree Falls

Impossible Tree Falls. Yosemite National Park, California. June 19, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

“Impossible Tree Falls” in full early season flow, fed by the runoff from a very heavy snowpack, Yosemite National Park.

I don’t know if this is really called Impossible Tree Falls, but I like the name and I’m going with it. My guess is that the reason for the name might be two-fold. First, the tree does grow right in the middle of this roadside water fall. It must be an interesting few weeks each spring when this tree wakes up to find itself in the middle of a raging water fall, since the rest of the year things are much calmer. Second, the trees seems to grow on nothing but bare rock. It is hard to see in this mist-covered and back-lit image, but it looks like the tree is rooted in solid rock.

For a person who likes to occasionally think of himself as something of a back-country photographer, it is almost embarrassing to admit that this waterfall is right next to Tioga Pass Road. I’ll be honest – I parked my car in a pull-out on the opposite side of the roadway and probably never moved more than 10 yards from there. To add insult to injury, at a couple of points I had to stop shooting while passing recreational vehicles interfered with the view! ;-)

But none of that makes the tumultuous little waterfall any less impressive. It appears above the road, where it seems to come out of a flatter forest area, and then it abruptly tumbles down a very steep rocky incline, twisting and turning around boulders – and one solitary tree.

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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.

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

Boulders and Spring Torrent, Cascade Creek

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Boulders and Spring Torrent, Cascade Creek
Boulders and Spring Torrent, Cascade Creek

Boulders and Spring Torrent, Cascade Creek. Yosemite National Park, California. May 7, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Runoff from spring snow melt rushes over boulders of Cascade Creek, Yosemite National Park.

I recently posted the black and white version of this photograph of Cascade Creek in full spring flow. I am still undecided about which I prefer. I haven’t printed either as of the date of this posting, and the results of that further work may help me decide.

The color version of this photograph posed a series of post-processing questions and problems that others who have worked with a scene like this one can probably imagine. The creek descends through a narrow, rocky gorge at this point and I photographed it early in the morning before any direct sunlight was able to reach the water. Benefits of shooting at this time included the softer light, which tends to both throw some light into the shadows and to soften the brightest highlights. This also permits a longer exposure which allows the water to blur a bit and express the wild motion of the creek. However, since the primary source of light was the open sky, the camera “sees” a very blue scene. (Our visual system compensates for this, so it doesn’t look as blue as it really is when you are on the scene.)

There are several ways to deal with the color balance issues that this situation creates. You could just “go with the blue,” and I’ve seen photographs done that way. I’ve even seen some in which the photograph amped up the saturation and ended up with something very blue. In general, that’s not my thing! I’m most often looking for something that seems “believable” – it may not be objectively accurate, but I intend it to be “subjectively accurate.” With this in mind, my first instinct was simply to warm the color balance in order to move away from the blue cast and toward a warmer one.

My immediate impression was that this was an improvement, and I worked with this interpretation for several days – but something about it didn’t sit quite right with me. (This is perhaps one reason that I also worked with the black and white rendition in the meantime.) Eventually I did some comparisons between the “warmed up” version and the original… and neither seemed like what I was after. The overly blue original looked garish but the overly warm version seemed artificial. I tried some other approaches and finally discovered that because the blue was so intense that I could simply desaturate it – more than you might think – and keep the “colder” coloration without letting it overwhelm the image.

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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.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II (at B&H)
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 126mm (at B&H)
ISO 100, f/16, 1/8 second