“Blue Hour: Lake and Fog” — Dusk fog rises from the surface of a subalpine lake reflecting a Sierra crest peak.
I had thought that I was done photographing for the evening when I passed this little lake and saw the fog rising in dusk light. The light was fading fast, so I quickly got out my tripod and set up for some relatively long exposures — this one was 15 seconds. The conditions arose after an afternoon and evening of rain ended and the skies began to clear, allowing fog to appear here and at every other similar body of water.
Photographs in these conditions — essentially twilight — test our understanding of what it means for a photograph to be “realistic.” The truth is that our eyes don’t see like this in extremely low light — so what you get here is a sort of “what the camera saw” image. (The eyes also do not interpolate drifting fog over a 15 second period!)
“Lokrum Island, Adriatic Sea” — Lokrum Island and the calm Adriatic Sea at Dubrovnik, evening.
We were in Croatia for a week and a half in the summer of 2023, at the end of a ten weeks of travel in (mostly Southern) Europe. Our visit to this country began with a few days in the remarkable old walled city of Dubrovnik. Late one day I decided it was time to circumnavigate the city on the walkways along the top of the old walls that surround it. The day came to an end as I walked, and I made this photograph right around dusk.
You have probably heard of the “rules of composition.” I’m pretty sure I violated most of them, if not all, in this photograph. “Rules” is the wrong context here — that word implies that there are specific right and wrong ways to approach composition. Instead the goal should be to understand the effects of compositional choices on the mood of a photograph. Here I wanted to express the stillness and lack of dynamism in this scene, its peacefulness and quiet. I think that the almost evenly divided vertical helps with that. And I wanted a bit of a sense of mystery — hence the bit of the island intruding into the frame from the far left.
“Forest and Pond” — Trees reflected in the still water of a subalpine pond, Yosemite.
I have had my eye on this little scene for a while. The trees stand along the far bank of a small subalpine pond in the Yosemite high country. During the daytime it is a tough photograph, with the sunshine becoming almost unbearably bright. My ideal might be to photograph it before sunrise or after sunset. But this time I found myself here a bit earlier in the day — so I went ahead and made some photographs.
A challenge with scenes like this is that the dynamic contrast between the highlights on the trees and the background shadows can be huge if there is direct sunlight — too big to capture in a photograph. That’s partly why the soft light helps —before sunrise, after sunset, or when something else shades the scene. I timed this so that the trees were entirely shaded, yet nearby subjects in brighter light cast some directional light into the scene.
“Meadow, Mountains, Morning Mist” — Morning mist rises from a subalpine meadow with trees in the foreground and peaks in the distance.
For a few days in early July I had this usually-crowded Yosemite location almost to myself. The nearby high-country campground was not yet open, and entry-restrictions to the park reduced the number of visitors. I camped just outside the park’s boundaries, and I entered in the mornings before sunrise — there was no line and I could get to my destinations quickly. On a couple of mornings the sunrise destination was this great subalpine meadow.
The meadow runs from east to west, so sunrise and sunset tend to send light down its length. I positioned myself near the west end on this morning, which meant that I was shooting nearly directly into that morning light. Here I placed a group of trees along the right side of the frame, to contrast the dark forms of their trunks and shadows with the lighter distant mountains, details muted by backlit haze.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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