Tag Archives: trees

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

Last Light, Mount Conness

July 6, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The final evening alpenglow illuminates the summit ridge of Mount Conness and the west face of Medlicott Dome in the Yosemite National Park high country.

This will be my final photograph of Mount Conness from the evening of June 18, the day that Tioga Pass Road opened this year and the day of one of the most spectacular Yosemite high country sunsets in recent memory. It will be the final both in the sense that I think I’ve now shared the best of the group of images of this sunset and in the sense that it was literally my final exposure of the evening.

The short back-story is that what started out as a fairly unimpressive evening (at least in the photographic sense) transformed over a short period into something extraordinary as the sun dropped to the horizon west of the Sierra and illuminated the clouds from below, creating rare and very special alpenglow conditions over a wide area of the Sierra. (During the week that followed quite a few people commented on this amazing light, which they had witnessed from locations as distant as Mono Lake on the east side and the Central Valley to the west.)

When I made this photograph the show was coming to an end. At this point the sun had already set a few minutes earlier – the exposure was made around 8:45 p.m. – and the light was low enough to require a six-second exposure. While it may seem like Mount Conness (the tallest peak near the left on the skyline) and other features are receiving direct sunlight, this is actually the remaining post-sunset glow in the western sky.

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

July 5, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

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.

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

Mount Gibbs, Frozen Pond, Morning

July 2, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Dawn light on the snow-capped summit of Mount Gibbs above a frozen pond, Yosemite National Park.

This small pond is perhaps familiar to visitors to Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Pass, though more likely with a different appearance. Here, early on a cold morning on the day after Tioga Pass opened for the season, the pond is still mostly frozen and it is surrounded by deep snow banks. The summit of Mount Gibbs is just touched by the first morning light as it passes through clouds over the Sierra crest.

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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

Mammoth Peak and Kuna Crest, Overflowing Tuolumne River

July 1, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Mammoth Peak and the Kuna Crest loom above as the Tuolumne River overflows its banks and floods surrounding meadows on a frosty spring morning, Yosemite National Park.

As I drove from Lee Vining Canyon over Tioga Pass and toward the Tenaya Lake area early in the morning, I came to the Tuolumne River where it passes under the bridge beneath the highway in the Tuolumne Meadows area. Just at about this moment the sun was rising high enough to begin to warm the frost covered meadow, at least the parts of it that were not flooded by the high water of the Tuolumne. Overnight it had risen almost to the level of the bridge and was so high that after passing under the bridge a small portion split off and headed into the trees to the right of the main branch. In a few weeks this flooded area and its reflecting surface will be gone, and there will just be a meadow and people will hike though it.

The backlight comes across the shoulder of Mammoth Peak, the high point near the end of the long snow-covered ridge of Kuna Crest, which runs parallel to Lyell Canyon toward Donohue Pass and the Sierra Crest.

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