Tag Archives: talus

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

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

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Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light
Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light. Yosemite National Park, California. September 18, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Photographers Charles Cramer and Karl Kroeber working in golden hour light along the shore of a sub-alpine lake high in the Sierra Nevada back-country of Yosemite National Park.

Look! A photograph of people! :-)

I spent a week or so on the trail in the Yosemite back-country with a group of five other photographers this past September. We spent a good stretch of time in the area of some scenic lakes in the northeastern portion of the park. I was out for a week and a day, while the rest of the group spent a few additional days on the trail. Not too long after arriving at the nearby sub-alpine lake that was to be our home for several days, various members of the group started to explore the surrounding area, and on this evening we all decided to climb up the valley from “our” lake to the next higher lake along the drainage. We travelled more or less cross-country up the shallow valley of the creek between the two lakes, passing through beautiful meadows before arriving along the shore of this lake very late in the afternoon.

Once we arrived we more or less split up and focused on different portions of the lake and its surroundings. I mostly shot in one very small area where some beautiful granite boulders were embedded in the shoreline meadow, providing an interesting foreground for photographs across the lake to a nearby peak as the golden hour light arrived. At one point I noticed that my friends Charlie Cramer and Karl Kroeber were shooting nearby, so I paused from my landscape photography to pivot my camera in their direction and make a photograph of them as they worked the golden hour light.

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

Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake

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Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake
Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake

Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake. Yosemite National Park, California. September 18, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on the trees, boulders, and grasses of a sub-alpine Sierra Nevada lake, Yosemite National Park.

On the morning after my hike up to this lake we were all up early and eager to explore the surrounding area. Everyone rose well before sunrise, and we headed off in various directions for our first morning of exploration and to start shooting. I began in the forest, looking for some corn lily plants and then various snags and fallen trees, but I eventually ended up along the shoreline of the lake. A lake like this one has almost limitless subjects to photograph. I began working the edge of the lake by photographing a few shoreline trees, then moved on to photograph some large boulders in the lake not far from the shore. As I moved clockwise along the edge of the water I began to pick up one of my favorite subjects – trees back-lit by morning light – and I worked to find a few compositions that spanned the bright foreground rocks and grasses, the middle distance shoreline trees, and then the more distant and shaded talus slopes leading to overhead ridges.

There were six of us in the group, and it was interesting to observe the different ways we each worked. Everyone was up pretty early, but for the most part each photographer headed off to look for his own special subjects. Occasionally we would run into one another, but we most often took pains to not try to re-do one another’s shots. Some among us immediately began to explore a bit more widely, heading around the lake and into the forest along the far shore, while others started very close to our campsite and slowly began to expand their circle of subjects. Over the course of a number of days we all got to know the lake and its surroundings much better – there is nothing like staying in one place for three or four days to reveal it in more depth than might be apparent on a short overnight visit.

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: Sierra Nevada

Lone Tree, Autumn Snow

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Lone Tree, Autumn Snow
Lone Tree, Autumn Snow

Lone Tree, Autumn Snow. Bishop Creek Area, California. October 8, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning sun shines on a lone tree on a rocky ridge after early autumn snow storm dusted the upper reaches of Bishop Creek Canyon, California.

This was the first clear morning after several days of early season snow in the Sierra Nevada. Earlier that morning I had driven the still unplowed road up to North Lake and photographed there for several (very cold!) hours, starting before sunrise. As the sun rose higher and I decided to drive back down the road, possibly to some lower elevation groves that are first hit by morning sun at a later hour. The road leaves North Lake and makes a few twists as it descends toward a long traverse of the hillside above the valley holding the town of Aspendell.

As I crossed this section of the road, two things happened. First, and somewhat oddly for a semi-isolated gravel road on a snowy day, a number of vehicles came up the road at about this time. This forced me to pull out alongside the narrow road and allow them to pass – after which I watched several of them get stuck on the slippery road just above my pull-out point. This, of course, brought the traffic to a dead stop while the flat-landers figured out how to drive their fancy AWD (!) vehicle on snow. Second, as I stopped here I caught sight of this interesting tree slightly below and off to the side of the traverse, on a hill still covered with fresh snow and backed by the shaded talus slope on the other side of the valley. Being stuck for a few minutes anyway, it seemed like a fine idea to take the camera and tripod out again and photograph the tree while waiting!

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.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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

Morning Light on Shoreline Trees

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Morning Light on Shoreline Trees
Morning Light on Shoreline Trees

Morning Light on Shoreline Trees. Yosemite National Park, California. September 19, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early morning light illuminates shoreline trees, meadows and rocks at McCabe lake, with talus and forest-covered slopes beyond, Yosemite National Park.

We were camped at this lake for several days, and by this morning I had developed a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to photograph at different times of the day. My main interest in the early morning was in shooting almost straight back into the sun as it rose above the ridges to the east and began to backlight the lodgepole pines around the lake, especially those along the rocky and meadowy shoreline on the west and south sides. So on this morning, my second-to-last at this lake, I was up reasonably early and off to the other side of the lake before sunrise.

Once I reached the other side of the lake I had two tasks in mind. One was to make a few photographs in the very soft light before the sun reached this area. The other was to find and remember several compositions that might well work when the sun actually arrived. Around the west end of the lake I found several that lined up some of the small shoreline peninsulas and the rocks along the shoreline. After photographing those low light subjects for a while, I noticed that the light was beginning to strike a few trees along the west end of the lake, so I quickly got back in position to start doing the photographs as the sun began to arrive.

This morning presented one slightly unusual shooting challenge. For so late in the season there were a lot of bugs flying around the edges of the lake, including a surprising number of mosquitos. Unfortunately, the same light that so nicely picks up the edges of the backlit trees… also nicely highlighted all of the flying insects along the shoreline! These insects can show up in photographs as hundreds of small to larger blurring streaks – which must be laboriously and individually cloned out in post. Fortunately, I have a way to deal with this and make the process a little easier. I made two exposures of each composition, separated by a second or two. Since it was windless, the trees barely moved at all – but the bugs did move. Since their traces appear at different places in the two images, I can superimpose them in Photoshop and then mask out each bug in the upper image, substituting the corresponding bug free portion of the image from the layer below. It is still a bit of work, but not nearly as bad as trying to clone all of these problems out.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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