Yosemite Valley, New Snow, Morning - Classic winter view of snow-covered Yosemite Valley scene photographed from Wawona Tunnel View after a late-winter storm.
It has been a bit of a tradition to post a photograph of Yosemite Valley in snow on Christmas Day – it seems like the Sierra way to send seasons greetings! I hope that you and yours are having a wonderful holiday!
(The photograph was made on the morning after a late-winter snow storm in The Valley back in 2006.)
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
Three harbor seals resting on a rock at Point Lobos State Reserve, California.
This is a photograph from a couple years back, made on one of my frequent visits to Point Lobos. If I recall correctly, there were two reasons that I focuses on these creatures on this visit: there were lots of them, and the light was less than wonderful for landscape/seascape photography!
During certain times of the year, it isn’t hard at all to find these large seals near the shoreline at Point Lobos and in many other locations along the coast. At Point Lobos you can often see them swimming around the kelp beds, with their large heads occasionally poking up from the water. They also spend time on some the half-submerged rocks near the shoreline (as this group is doing) or even hauled out on some of the more secluded beaches and coves.
When I first started photographing them seriously I was surprised to find that they pay attention to humans – sometimes a lot of attention. Sometimes it seems that they are regarding me as carefully as I am watching them! Note that two of the seals are staring straight up at my position in this photograph. This habit gives them the appearance of being very attentive creatures and suggests, to me at least, a degree of intelligence and self-possession.
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
A small tree grows in a shoreline rock garden along a Sierra Nevada lake in the back-country of Yosemite National Park.
I’m posting this one because a person who posted here a week or two ago on a similar photograph asked whether I had made any photographs that included a bit more of the surface of the lake and its reflections of the forest in the distance. In fact, I had one more, and this is it.
I made this photograph and the other one in soft light at the edge of the day when no direct sunlight was in the scene at all. While this can flatten the light a bit, it also tends to fill in that shadow areas and create a less harsh sort of light. In also contributed to the interesting reflected and diffused forms of the forest along the far bank of the lake, whose vertical forms cross the horizontal forms of underwater rocks along the bottom of the lake bed.
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
Morning light on a tree-covered peninsula along the edge of a subalpine lake with a talus slope backdrop, Yosemite National Park.
I think that the primary thing that first caught my attention in this little scene was the very twisted and curving tree about 1/3 of the way in from the right edge of the frame. I wonder why one tree ended up growing in such an odd way when its neighbors seem to have managed to grown in a straight and conventional manner? The light on these trees was coming from almost directly behind them, as the sun had just topped the ridge above and out of the frame. Because the talus slope is fairly steep, portions of it remain in shade.
This photograph posed a few interesting challenges, and they are probably not all immediately apparent. One that may be visible to those who are familiar with such scenes is the fact that back-light like this can create some very bright highlights that can “blow out” in a digital camera exposure. In fact, these highlights are what determine the exposure for such a scene. If accommodating the bright highlights makes the shadows too dark, I can either work a bit in post to bring back some shadow detail or I can make a separate exposure for the shadows and blend the two in post. That wasn’t necessary here – I was able to capture the scene in a single exposure. The second odd little problem was that swarms of mosquitos were flying just above the water all around the shoreline of the lake. Although you cannot see them in this small jpg, there were many, many little traces of the bugs in the air – so many, in fact, that I had to somewhat laboriously clone out a good number of the most obvious of them.
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
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
