Autumn storm clouds hover around a granite precipice
It was a late in the afternoon — almost evening, actually — when I made this photograph near the end of October. I had been in the Yosemite area for a few days, photographing fall color and the moody conditions of an early season rain storm, and late in the day as the storm cleared out the remnant clouds hugged the granite cliffs of the Valley.
Conditions like these are highly variable and continuously change from moment to moment. This is not the sort of landscape that you photograph by carefully composing a subject and then making a single exposure! The clouds are in motion, and with the intense backlight from the west the visibility of elements of the landscape changes continuously. Here the light in the clouds was so bright that the exposure rendered the shaded cliff face in very dark tones.
Rocks fallen from vertical cliffs line the edges of a deep blue alpine lake
As I write this tonight for posting tomorrow, winter is over and spring is a few hours old. It is perhaps for that reason — the start of spring and the inevitability of summer — that I found myself looking though some old photograph files from a summer about eight years in the past. There is a practical reason to revisit the old files from time to time; I often find photographs that now look pretty interesting that I apparently skipped over originally, for one reason or another. But it is also an opportunity to revisit the older memories as well, since looking at the photographs brings back the recall of many other details of such Sierra trips.
On this trip I crossed the Southern Sierra from west to east with a small group of long-time trail friends. I am not sure why, but I had not been back on this trail in the decades since my first visit — so I was excited to revisit this spectacular route. Today I began tracking the progress of the trip via the old photographs, starting on the first day and looking at photograph up through day three, when we climbed from a beautiful lake to cross the Kaweah Mountains and head east. I came to this photograph, which is a vertical orientation interpretation on a scene in another of my photographs that may be somewhat recognizable. At the time when I made the original print I think I must have committed to the horizontal format and, thus, put the vertical on the back burner. but today I decided that I like this version, too, with a bit less emphasis on the water and a bit more on the vertical thrust of the rocky walls.
Winter mist and snow swirl above the edge of Yosemite Valley cliffs
We spent three days in Yosemite Valley near the end of February and through the first day of March. The weather forecast had been for snow all the way down to the Valley floor, so we thought our timing appeared to be perfect — there are few things more beautiful than this valley in new snow. Unfortunately, as seems to have been the typical pattern this winter, the snow didn’t amount to much. I had a five-minute flurry while photographing in one of the meadows very early in the morning, and a drive up and out of the Valley to higher points put us in light snowfall for a while.
To make this photograph I stopped at an iconic location, but then I looked up rather than in the direction where the famous view lay. With a long lens on my camera I was able to compose little vignettes highlighting bits of the near vertical world where the highlands area meet the upper rims of the cliffs dropping into the Valley. Here mist and light snowfall blows across the slanting terrain just above the void. Most of the image is relatively obscured — the foreground cliff is dark enough to mute many details, and near the top of the frame the mist is lit intensely by the sun.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
I have backpacked in California’s Sierra Nevada range for quite a few decades. A number (a large number!) of years ago my wife and I went on a two-week trans-Sierra backpack trip that traversed the range from west to east between Crescent Meadow and Whitney Portal, following a route known as the “High Sierra Trail.” On the third morning we left our camp and began the stiff ascent toward the pass we had to cross to enter the Kern River drainage. 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 the subject by Vern Clevenger.)
My wife and I were enthusiastic about photography in those days, too, and we carried a couple of Pentax SLRs and a few lenses and many rolls of film into the back-country. But I don’t think I came back with more than a few “snapshots” 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 toward that small bowl, but this time I had a plan to photograph the lake and the equipment to do it right. 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 I topped a small saddle and saw the familiar scene before 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 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 of switchbacks up the trail I happened to look back at the lake from a slightly higher vantage point, and from here the astonishing deep 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 off and setting all that stuff up again!” Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: “Submerged Boulders, Lake, and Cliffs”→
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 and Amazon.
