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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