Tag Archives: brief

Yosemite High Country – A Brief Late July Report

Carefully timing my visit to miss the weekend crowds, I spent the better part of the last week of July (2011) in the Yosemite National Park high country along and around Tioga Pass Road. I posted the first photograph from this visit earlier today, and more will appear here soon. But while the visit is still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d share a few observations and comments that might be useful to others heading there or to other parts of the high Sierra soon.

In a typical late July, all of the snow is melted out at “campground elevations” (generally 8000′ – 9000′ or so – Tuolumne Meadows is at 8600′), essentially all of the usual high country areas are accessible by trail or cross-country travel, wildflowers are at or near their peak, mosquito populations have reached their peak, and visitors are starting to arrive en masse for day use, camping, and backpacking. With the exception of the influx of visitors, this is not quite a typical season, however.

Snow – As I drove up Tioga Pass Road on July 26, the first surprise was finding that there were still large snow patches in some forested areas as low as 8000′ or so. I don’t recall seeing this much snow so low so late in the season in the past. (My memory may not include the lower elevations at this time of year in 1996, the last year with such impressive snow fall.) I stayed at the Porcupine Flat campground, and at least one site there still had enough snow as to make it pretty unusable. Continue reading Yosemite High Country – A Brief Late July Report

Brief Thoughts on The Life of a Photograph

The image I posted earlier today both here at the blog and on Google+ got me thinking about the various ways that a photograph can “come to life.” This particular image followed a path that several other images that I consider to be among my best followed – namely, it languished in my raw file archive for nearly a year before I rediscovered it recently while going back through the old files. I recognized this pattern some time ago, and I now make it a habit to revisit all of my (thousands and thousands of) raw files about a year after I shoot them.

Why didn’t I “see” this image when I first reviewed raw files right after the shoot? I’m not entirely certain, but several ideas come to mind. Sometimes at the time of the shoot I have a strongly fixed notion of how I want to portray the subject , and as I shoot I’m already categorizing exposures by how well they correspond to this preconception. So when I initially go through the raws I may be mostly looking for what fits my expectations as opposed to looking objectively at what works on its own merits. Coming back a year later allows me to better see the image for what it is, without having my judgment so affected by prior expectations.

Related to this is the sheer number of images and how one deals with them in the post-processing workflow. I may begin with what I think are the most promising couple of images from a shoot and then take them all the way to a print-ready (or actually printed) stage. Once I’ve done that with the first selects from a given subject, I’m more likely to move on to other subjects – and potentially leave other good images in the dust.

There is a lot more to say about this, I think, but I’ll save the longer explication for another blog post in the future. Does anyone else make a practice of doing a full review of raw files at some future date?

A Brief Note About Upcoming Posts

Posting a new photograph here every day isn’t easy! I usually try to work ahead so that I have a number of photographs queued up in advance. (No, I’m not really up at 4:00 a.m. Pacific every day finishing up and posting a new photo… ;-)

About a month ago I found myself in the difficult position of having no new photograph ready for the next day’s post on more than one occasion. Fortunately, this happened at about the time of my annual ritual of reviewing all of my photographs from the previous year. This year that amounted to more than 10,000 frames. Not surprisingly, I found a few interesting photographs that I had forgotten or which didn’t make sense to me originally.

During the past few weeks I’ve had more opportunities to get out and shoot. In fact, right now I have nearly two weeks of photographs queued up for posting here. I had the opportunity to spend a rainy afternoon at the Getty Center in Los Angeles at the end of December, and a series of photographs from that adventure will appear soon. I also had the chance to make a quick visit to the Big Sur coast yesterday and I have a few new photographs from that trip that will appear soon – including a new shot of the Rocky Creek Bridge area that I think I like a lot.

Stay tuned!