Tag Archives: wilderness

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Kearsarge Pinnacles

September 17, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late afternoon like on alpine lakes, meadows, and forest below Kearsarge Pinnacles, Kings Canyon National Park.

Kearsarge Pinnacles shares its name with (Kearsarge) lakes and a (Kearsarge) pass just to the west of the Onion Valley trailhead. This is not exactly an untraveled spot in the Sierra, given that it is merely one day in on a reasonable (by east side standards) pass and that it provides access to some very popular areas of the Kings Canyon back-country and to the John Muir Trail.

I’ve been over this pass a number of times. I’ve come in this way to start trips north over Baxter Pass and south into the upper Kern River basin and over Mt. Whitney. I exited here some years back on the ninth day of a trip that started at Bishop Pass and crossed a series of JMT high passes including (in addition to Bishop) Mather, Pinchot, and Glenn passes.

Here late afternoon light, filtered by clouds, illuminates the granite benches and scattered trees above a couple of the upper lakes in the basin. Despite the obvious impressive beauty of this location, I find that it presents some photographic challenges, at least when I try to photograph “grand views” of the area and the surrounding landscape. One of them, at least in my experience, is that the light angles can be a bit tricky. For example, as the sun sets it isn’t quite far enough north to light up the slopes of the pinnacles, and some of the interesting foreground subjects go into shadow as the light warms up. On this evening I made one of those timing discoveries that I’ll have to remember and apply the next time I’m there – from about the location of this photograph there was a minute or two of very interesting light right on the upper edges of the closer ridges… which I wasn’t quite quick enough to capture!

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.

Photographs: Cascades, Photographs: Nature

Sunset, Mt. Shuksan and Picture Lake

September 5, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Sunset on cloud-shrouded summit of Mt. Shuksan with Picture Lake in the foreground, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington.

Icon alert! I understand that photographing Mt. Shuksan from this locale is, in the Pacific Northwest context, perhaps almost equivalent to photographing the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands or photographing Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View. As a brand new photographer of Cascades Range subjects, I plead guilty to succumbing to this icon and photographing it. (I’m told that the only thing that this photograph needs in order to qualify for full “yet another photo of an icon” status would be to come back in a month and shoot it when the fall colors appear.)

My brother and I had been up higher photographing the Artist Point area for most of the afternoon, and he suggested that since we were here we might stop at Picture Lake on the way back down the mountain and see what might develop. I’m glad he did since, icon status aside, this really is a stunning and beautiful location and it was a quiet and beautiful evening. Several things made it special, I think. First, while the summit of Shuksan never fully cleared, the clouds shrouding the summit gave it a more dramatic aspect than might have been the case with an unobstructed view. Second, much to our surprise, we were not joined by a throng of other photographers. At first we were the only ones there, and later we only saw a few others in the area.

This was a technically challenging scene to photograph. The lake and foreground trees were in shadow at this point, though on the scene one could still see the details of the forest along and beyond the far shore. Yet the summit of Shuksan and the clouds were in full sun, and making this even more difficult, the red sunset light was extra intense. The eye can take all of this in without a problem as you move your focus from foreground to distant peak, but the camera is not as capable – and the dynamic range of the scene dramatically exceeds the capabilities of cameras. So, again, this photograph is a composite of three exposures manually blended in post to combine the best exposures of bright and saturated highlights with the best exposure of the dark forest along the shore of the lake.

Update on 9/29/10: I recently noticed that I had misidentified the lake in the photograph! I have corrected the post to call it by its correct name, Picture Lake.

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.

Photographs: Cascades, Photographs: Nature

Sub-Alpine Ponds in Afternoon Light, Artist Point

September 2, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 10 Comments

A trail weaves through meadow and among sub-alpine ponds at Artist Point with the ridge of Mt. Shuksan beyond – Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington.

This is another photograph from my late-August afternoon exploration of the stunning ridgeline of Artist Point in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest near the Mt. Baker ski area. This ridge runs through an intimate landscape comprised of small rock fields, meadows with running streams, groves and isolated high elevation trees, and small ponds – and provides a truly stunning panorama that takes in Mount Baker on one side and Mount Shuksan on the other, with distant peaks all around. We could hardly have asked for better conditions for late-afternoon photography. Dramatic clouds ringed the peaks, sometimes obscuring them and sometimes clearing for a moment, and bright sun alternated with softer and diffused light as cloud shadows moved across the ridge.

A bit further along the ridge there is a series of small snow-melt lakes – what I usually refer to as “tarns” in the Sierra. Here a trail winds in front of a couple of them that sit in rocky hollows in front a few ridgeline trees, with the cloud-shrouded shoulder of glacier-covered Mount Shuksan beyond.

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.

Photographs: Cascades, Photographs: Nature

Artist Point Meadow, Mount Shuksan

September 1, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 8 Comments

Artist Point and Mt. Shuksan — “Artist Point Meadow, Mount Shuksan” — The view of cloud-shrouded Mount Shuksan from a heather-filled sub-alpine meadow at Artist Point, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington.

As my brother and I came around the corner of this trail along the side of the Artist Point ridge, it took our breath away. I arrived a moment after he did, and found him already down among the heather flowers near the small run-off creek setting up his tilt-shift lens to make a close-up photograph of the flowers with the mountains in the distance. Once he finished, I went to work on this wider view of the scene, including the nearby foreground meadow and flowers, the trees along the edge of the drop-off, the pool of light in the valley beyond, and the shoulder of cloud-rimmed Mt. Shuksan with a dramatic sky beyond.

On a technical note, this was a very difficult exposure. When I looked down at the flowers and plants I saw what you see here, and when I looked up I saw the cloud-filled sky roughly as it appears in this photograph – but the dynamic range was so wide (ranging from parts of the foreground trees in deep shadow to distant snow fields in direct sun) that one exposure could not capture all of the scene data… so I used three which were then combined in post using masked layers and blended manually.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Links: Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Info.

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.