A Photograph Exposed: “Submerged Boulders, Precipice Lake”

Posted on 14 January 2010

(This is the first in a series of posts that will more fully discuss some of my photographs and their backgrounds.)

I have backpacked in California’s Sierra Nevada range for quite a few decades. A number of years ago I was on a two-week trans-Sierra pack trip with my wife that traversed the range west to east between Crescent Meadow and Whitney Portal, primarily following a route known as the “High Sierra Trail.” On the third morning we left our camp at Hamilton Lake and began the stiff ascent toward Kaweah Gap. Near the top of the steepest part of the climb the trail momentarily leveled out and we found ourselves facing a high, rockbound lake with a perfectly vertical patterned rock face dropping straight into the water on the far side. The view seemed familiar – and I realized that it was a scene captured by Ansel Adams (“Frozen Lake and Cliffs“) in the early 1930s. (I also later realized that there is a wonderful and well-known photograph of Precipice Lake by Vern Clevenger.)

My wife and I were enthusiastic about photography in those days – we carried a couple Pentax SLRs and a few lenses. But I don’t think I got more than a snapshot of this lake on that trip. Fast-forward a few decades to 2008 when a group of my backpacking friends decided to follow this same trans-Sierra route – and, of course, I had to join them. Once again, I found myself ascending the trail above Hamilton Lake toward that small bowl, but this time I had a plan to photograph the lake and the proper equipment to do so. I recalled parts of the climb from my previous trip, but I had probably forgotten more than I remembered during the intervening decades. As the trail traverses a beautiful wet section full of wildflowers (which I had forgotten) I could tell that the lake was just ahead, and soon it topped a small saddle and immediately the familiar view was in front of me.

As planned, I set to work doing some of the photography that I had contemplated before the trip. To be honest, I mainly worked from more or less the location that Adams must have used, though the conditions were a bit different on this day – the light was changeable as broken clouds passed above, and there was very little snow, much less any ice, left at the lake. After perhaps 30 or 45 minutes of work, my hiking partners were getting restless and it was time to move on. I felt that I had worked this scene about as much as possible under the circumstances – and I did get a photograph of the “classic view” that I like a great deal – so I loaded up my heavy 9-day backpack load, put away the camera, and strapped the tripod to the outside of the pack. I hoisted the load and slowly started up the switchbacks immediately above the lake.

A couple switchbacks up the trail I happened to look back at the lake from a slightly higher vantage point, and from here the astonishing blue color of the lake and the apron of rocks falling into the water became visible. My first reaction was a combination of “Wow!” and “No way am I taking this pack odd and setting all that stuff up again!” Fortunately, I’ve learned to give in to the former more than the latter – you never know if you’ll see certain sights again – so I dropped the pack and set up the tripod, framed up the scene and made a few exposures as the broken clouds scattered varying light across the scene. (For those who imagine that landscape photography is always a slow and contemplative process and that it always results from careful pre-planning and pre-visualization… baloney! Sometimes it requires quick and almost intuitive action and a fair amount of good luck. ;-)

Now step forward about a year or so. Like many of us, I had been coming up to speed for several years with the new media of digital cameras and inkjet printing. I felt that I was “getting it” with the camera and the exposure side of the process. But while I was producing prints that were fine, I realized that there things that I still needed to understand better if I wanted to make prints that would really be special. I did a lot of reading and experimenting – both of which are usually effective ways for me to learn – but I began to think about other ways I might more quickly make progress. As luck would have it, my wife and I have some “history” with one of the finest photographers and printers using digital media today, Charles Cramer. (Believe it or not, Charlie played organ at our wedding!) As I recall it now, I decided to contact Charlie and ask for some advice about how to proceed – perhaps a workshop would be useful or maybe he would recommend enrolling in a class at an area college. What Charlie said, essentially, was “Come on over and bring some files and I’ll look at them with you.”

I arrived with a few that I thought might be interesting to work with. Charlie took a look and, unexpectedly, decided that we would work on this one. Charlie, as the generous person I know him to be, essentially gave me a four-hour personal workshop on my photograph. I won’t go into all of the details of what I learned, but aside from a starting to pick up a new repertoire of techniques to apply to my photographs I learned a more important lesson that I have encapsulated into a motto: “let the light in.” Basically, he showed me how to go from images that now seem, in retrospect, to be dim and murky to prints that seem more full of light – I don’t know quite how to describe it in any other way. So this photograph became a sort of watershed in my still-continuing process of understanding how to move the photograph more effectively towards a print. And for this, Charlie, I again say, “Thank you!” (Hint: Charlie teaches workshops. Sign up early – they usually sell out.)

From time to time people ask me how to get to Precipice Lake, when it is best to shoot it, whether it always looks like this, and whether there are similar lakes in the Sierra. Let me take those questions in order.

Precipice Lake is not technically difficult to get to, but it is a long walk and you must backpack. The lake is about 20 miles from the trailhead at Crescent Meadow in Sequoia National Park. Strong backpackers might be able to get there and back in four days, but photographers probably will take more time. I have always hiked about half way to Hamilton Lake the first day, camped at Hamilton Lake the second night, and then passed by Precipice Lake on my way over Kaweah Gap and into Big Arroyo on the third day. At this point, I have a vague idea of going back there and setting up a bivy camp right near Precipice lake, perhaps by late morning on day three, then exploring the area more thoroughly for the rest of the day. I’d get up the next morning and shoot it (and some surrounding areas) again before heading out. This sounds like close to a one-week trip.

There are two parts to the answer to the “when” question, time of year and time of day. I’ve been there twice now. The first time was close to the end of August in a relatively wet year and the second was near the beginning of August in a drier season. I’d aim more for the earlier date than the later one. You may pay a price in mosquito bites, but you’ll see more wildflowers along the way and there is more likely to still be a bit of snow around. Both times that I’ve been there I arrived around mid-morning. In many situations this might not be an ideal photographic hour, but at Precipice I’ve found this to be a good time to shoot. Because there are high peaks above the lake the light still seems fine for shooting this late in the day – and much earlier in the day you would not get the light shining into the water that diffuses over the rocks in my photograph. I’ve never been there after about noon, though I wonder what might happen later in the day. The location is relatively open to light from the west, so it is possible that evening light could be interesting. (Excuse enough, perhaps, for the return trip I described in the previous paragraph?)

Of course, it was my good fortune to arrive on a day when broken clouds scattered fast-moving patches of light across the landscape, often softening the light and illuminating shaded areas. You really cannot count on that sort of light in the Sierra, where you’ll more often encounter extended periods of boringly perfect cloud-free weather.

As to the question of whether there are similar Sierra Lakes that are more accessible, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. They would need to be very high, surrounded on several sides by very high and steep rock walls, be deep and still enough to produce the deep blue coloration, and have the loose rocks spilling into the lake in just the right spot. I’ll bet that someone can think of a lake that reminds them of this… but I don’t think I’ve seen one. It is my view that each Sierra lake has its own “personality,” and I’m more interested in discovering the unique qualities of each.

Category: Photograph Exposed
Tags: adams, ansel, backpacking, boulders, charles, charlie, clevenger, cramer, crescent, exposed, gap, hamilton, kaweah, lake, meadow, Mountain, national, nevada, park, photograph, precipice, print, range, seki, sequoia, sierra, submerged, vern, workshop

3 comments to A Photograph Exposed: “Submerged Boulders, Precipice Lake”

Ernie

says:

January 14, 2010 at 7:59 pm

Whatever you did with Charlie worked! Quite well in fact – my first thought when I saw this photo was that it was quite a bit brighter than I remembered. It is a beautiful place and you’ve captured it so well!