Tag Archives: trees

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

Fog and Trees, Yosemite Valley

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Fog and Trees, Yosemite Valley
Fog and Trees, Yosemite Valley

Fog and Trees, Yosemite Valley. Yosemite National Park, California. October 30, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Forest trees are almost completely obscured by evening fog in Yosemite Valley.

If you have been watching some of my recently posted photographs, you have perhaps figured out that I’m working on a series of photographs in which mist and fog and clouds obscure to a greater or lesser extent some underlying elements of the landscape. (If you haven’t been watching my recent posts… you can still be my friend! ;-) In a few of them I am seeing how far I can take this and still have an interesting photograph. This one marks a further step along that path in that at least half of the scene has little or no detail, being almost completely obscured by drifting fog, and even in the areas where trees are still visible the details are very muted.

I’m thinking about just how little detail I can retain in the scene and still retain a sense of form. And this isn’t the most extreme in the series at all. I’m working on another one which retains less “solid” detail than this one. (It may be that it works as a print but perhaps not as a web jpg, in which case I may not post it here – we’ll see.)

The photograph was made at – icon alert! – Wawona Tunnel View above Yosemite Valley on an evening when I had little interest in shooting the classic view of the Valley itself, but had instead gone there because I was almost certain that fog would form among the trees on the Valley floor as the temperature dropped following a rainy day. If anyone had noticed me shooting on that evening among the line-up of dozens of photographers, they might have been perplexed as to why I was aiming a very large lens down when the famous view was obviously straight ahead! ;-)

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Mist Shrouded Spire, Yosemite Valley

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Mist Shrouded Spire, Yosemite Valley
Mist Shrouded Spire, Yosemite Valley

Mist Shrouded Spire, Yosemite Valley. Yosemite National Park, California. October 30, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A rocky spire emerges from the mist of an autumn storm along the rim of Yosemite Valley.

Still mining the backlog of photographs from my late-October visit to Yosemite Valley, here is another photograph made in the beautiful rainy and misty conditions of an autumn storm that came across the Sierra during the last weekend of the month. Since I’m crazy about photographing mist and fog, there was almost too much to shoot at times! When I made this photograph I was moving back and forth between isolated shots of small sections of the upper Valley rim blanketed by fog and light rain, and the scene of Yosemite Falls which was alternately socked in and almost clear. I kept my eyes on the cloud conditions just upwind of the falls, and when it looked like a clearing was approaching I would swing my camera that direction. Then, as thicker clouds moved across the falls and obliterated that view I redirected the camera towards small and quickly changing bits of cloud-covered landscape elsewhere along the cliffs nearby.

This is the sort of scene that makes me think more about how tremendously difficult it was/is to photograph such things with film! A subject like this is anything but static – the clouds move across and through the trees and rocks and change continuously, often so quickly that you only realize what has happened when the opportunity has passed. Accomplishing this with a few sheets of film must require not only tremendously good luck but also an excellent understanding of how these conditions evolve. I try to apply the same awareness of the conditions when I shoot such scenes… but I’m quite happy to be able to make multiple exposures quickly and without a lot of fuss!

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Commentary, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Glacier Point and Ground Fog in Ahwahnee Meadow, Autumn

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Glacier Point and Ground Fog in Ahwahnee Meadow, Autumn
Glacier Point and Ground Fog in Ahwahnee Meadow, Autumn

Glacier Point and Ground Fog in Ahwahnee Meadow, Autumn. Yosemite Valley, California. October 31, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Thin morning ground fog floats above the dry autumn grasses of Ahwahnee Meadow below the granite cliffs of Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley.

During the cooler and wetter months of the year, ground fog often forms in the meadows of Yosemite Valley. Ahwahnee Meadow is one of the places I like to photograph these conditions, and since this was the morning after a damp and rainy day, I arrived here very early in anticipation of conditions that might produce the fog. It was very cold when I arrived, certainly below freezing by at least a few degrees. At first the fog was much denser and a bit deeper. I have photographs from this earlier pre-dawn period when a herd of deer passed through the meadow. Eventually, as the sun rose high enough that the light beams began to clear the mountains to the east of the Valley, the first light began to strike the upper slopes and walls of Glacier Point. As this happened and the air began to move and the temperature stopped dropping, the fog began to thin. This photograph was made shortly before the fog actually dissipated completely, and thin streamers of mist are broken up by clearer areas.

I have to admit that I do not know what the foreground plant is. (Hint: I won’t mind even a tiny bit if someone wants to write and tell me! :-) Cottony tufts are found at the top of long stems, growing out of odd shaped pods. I shot this with a very wide angle lens so that I could include some of this foreground foliage and the fill width of Glacier Point.

On a technical note, this image incorporates a blend of two exposures. Portions of the sky at the left side of the frame were very bright, while much of the rest of the scene was in shade and a lot darker. Almost the entire frame is from the 1/15 second exposure, but I have manually blended in a bit of the 1/40 second exposure in the area of cloudy sky at upper left in order to retain a bit of detail there. Also, though it should be obvious, this was shot with an ultra-wide angle lens – a 17mm focal length on a full frame DSLR. If you are at all familiar with this location in the Valley you will recognize that this is a bit of an unusual view.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Fog-Shrouded Trees and Ridges, Yosemite Valley

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Fog-Shrouded Trees and Ridges, Yosemite Valley
Fog-Shrouded Trees and Ridges, Yosemite Valley

Fog-Shrouded Trees and Ridges, Yosemite Valley. Yosemite National Park, California. October 30, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

As an autumn storm begins to clear, fog and mist swirls among trees and ridges along the rim of Yosemite Valley.

After a few days of gaudy fall color, I am returning briefly to non-gaudy fall black and white! This is another – and perhaps the last for a while – in the series of misty and cloudy photographs from my visit to Yosemite in late October as a fall storm was passing over the Valley. I was happy when I saw that my planned visit would coincide with a storm, since I love shooting the Valley in the fall in cloudy and wet conditions. As much as I enjoy the beautiful and wam late-summer days, I find the “bad” weather a lot more interesting photographically. The Valley did not disappoint during this visit – I had light rain, clouds ringing the valley, fog both on the Valley floor and among the ridges and trees along the rim, and even some cloud-filtered sunlight.

The subject of this photograph could be any of what seems like an infinite number of scenes of cliffs and ridges and trees along the upper walls of the Valley. The specific spot isn’t important, though it was just to the west of Glacier Point. At times the clouds almost completely obscured the cliff and trees, but as they moved across the face they would periodically clear enough to make bits of the scene momentarily visible. This was another of those situations in which the landscape was emphatically not static – instead it was in a constant state of flux, and it required close and constant attention to catch the photographable moments.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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