Tag Archives: tuolumne

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

Forest And Cliffs, Evening

September 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Forest trees, lit by evening light, ascend granite cliffs in the Yosemite National Park back-country.

From September 14 through September 21 I spent eight days on the trail in the back-country of Yosemite National Park, starting and ending at Tuolumne Meadows, taking time to photograph some of the areas I passed through. I was fortunate to be able to join up with a group of five outstanding Yosemite photographers on all but the last day – they were to remain in the high country for several more days after I left.

On the second evening of the trip I walked to a nearby rocky area to photograph, well, rocks – granite slabs, actually, that are marked by reddish deposits and broken up by trees struggling to grow in cracks and small pockets of soil in the rock. I also wanted to photograph a nearby section of the Tuolumne River as it descended through some steep areas of granite as it entered a narrower section of canyon. I started working perhaps an hour and a half or so before sunset, and as actual sunset approached I looked up from these subjects to see the light from the lowering sun beginning to backlight trees high on a cliff above my position and to angle across the edges of the cliffs themselves. I switched gears – and lenses – and began to work on finding compositions in this rocky terrain, seen through a bit of haze and lit by increasingly warm light.

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

Tuolumne Meadows Trees, Sunset

August 23, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Trees standing at the edge of Tuolumne Meadows in sunset light, Yosemite National Park.

After first shooting in another location a few miles away late in the day – and being chased back to my car by the worst clouds of mosquitoes I have encountered in recent memory – I found myself with a bit of extra time at the start of the “golden hour,” so I headed up to Tuolumne to see what I could find involving trees and the meadows and perhaps some of the surrounding mountains as the day came to an end. It was not long before the light left the meadow when I arrived, so I kept my eyes open for any subject that might look good in this warm light. I spotted these trees right alongside the roadway, pulled over, set up my tripod, and made a few exposures just before the light started disappearing from the west end of the meadow.

To me, this image has virtually all of the elements that say “Tuolumne Meadows” – the scattered trees in the meadow, the golden evening light on the July grasses, rock outcroppings here and there, and the surrounding forest with higher peaks beyond.

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Commentary, Locations

The Impossible Trip: Yosemite in Seven Hours?

August 15, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

That was the question that someone posed today in a photography forum I read:

We will be visiting Yosemite for approximately 7-8 hours one day the 2nd week of October as part of a weeklong trip to Tahoe (we live on the East Coast). I have been to Yosemite before (many years ago), she has not. Although we know it would take much more time to truly experience Yosemite this is the maximum time we can spend so we are looking for the top spots so we can make the most of the short time we have there.

(There was a bit more that I haven’t included here – the poster also would be staying in Mariposa the night before, and needed to drive across Tioga Pass and be in Tahoe that evening… and wanted to do photography along the way!)

Having visited the park for decades, and for an amount of time perhaps totaling well over a year altogether, and still getting to know the place, my first reaction was to ignore the question or respond with a wise-crack one-liner. Frankly, I don’t think it is really possible to do real photography of “the park” during a seven-hour visit. (With careful planning it would be possible to photograph a subject or two perhaps, but that is a different issue.) In any case, I suppressed my instinct to respond along the lines of “are you kidding!?” and instead tried to provide a realistic outline of what this experience might entail. While I’m spoiled, living only hours from the park, I do understand that others may find themselves in the area and not want to miss at least having a brief experience with such a place. And perhaps the way-too-brief visit might be enough to encourage such visitors to find a way to return for a longer visit.

So, with all of that in mind, here is what I wrote, slightly modified for this post:

You are asking quite a lot here… for a seven hour visit that will include at least 3-4 hours of driving… from Mariposa, into and around the Valley, and then up and over Tioga Pass… plus leaving enough time for the remaining hours-long drive to Tahoe.

Too bad, I’m afraid.

To be honest, the odds that you’ll be able to do much beyond “record-my-quick-visit” photography in the park are slender given the amount of time you’ll be there, your tight schedule, and the fact that you’ll be there mostly during the “blah light” time of day. To some extent, I’m inclined to recommend that you not make photography your primary goal – one reason being that trying to “get those photographs” will distract you even more from you brief opportunity to actually see and experience the place a bit. I photograph in the park frequently, so I know where and how to shoot, and I would not try to do real photography under the conditions you describe.

Having said all of that, the broad outlines of your visit must be: Continue reading The Impossible Trip: Yosemite in Seven Hours? →

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

Sunset and Moonrise, Kuna Crest

August 15, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The nearly- full moon rises above the sunset light on Kuna Crest, Yosemite National Park.

Kuna Crest runs up Lyell Canyon between the Lyell and Dana forks of the Tuolumne River with the Sierra crest at one end and Mammoth Peak at the other. (Mammoth Peak is the large peak straight in front of you as you top Tioga Pass entering Yosemite National Park.) This ridge can catch great sunset light during the summer, and as I came down from the pass, heading back toward my camp at Porcupine Flat, and saw the almost full moon appearing over the shoulder of the ridge I decided to quickly stop and make a few exposures as the last light was about to leave the forest and soon after the peaks.

If you have tried photographing a scene that includes the moon in the early evening you know that the exposure is a tricky thing. The moon is lit by daylight, so it isn’t too surprising that the “correct” exposure for the moon is close to a normal daytime exposure. But that is not the right exposure for the rest of the scene, which turns out to be quite a bit darker than daylight at this time of day. In this scene things were even more complicates as the very saturated red colors on the ridge were quite “hot,” while the foreground meadow and forest was in shade and both darker and cooler in color. Basically, the dynamic range between the moon and the foreground was too large for a single exposure… so I made several.

At the time of exposure I thought that I might need as many as three component images in the final photograph – they would be one exposed for the bright ridge and sky, one exposed for the rather dark and shadowed foreground, and possibly a third that correctly exposed the moon. To be on the safe side I bracketed four exposures. When I began to work on the image I figured out that in this case I could construct a final “believable” image from two exposures if I was careful and could make some additional adjustments during post.

This is an example of a shot in which the use of a graduated neutral density filter could have been problematic, but where exposure blending could work very well. (“Exposure blending” is one term for the process of manually combining two component exposures using masked layers in Photoshop. No, it is not the same thing as HDR photography.) One of the things that would have been quite tricking using graduated neutral density filters is that the division between the brighter upper half and the darker lower half is not linear. Instead, the roughly follows the curved boundary between the lower meadow and dark trees and the still sunlit trees and the peak and sky.

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