Posts Tagged Elm
Morning light on Cook’s Meadow
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on April 30, 2010
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Yesterday marked the end last Yosemite workshop with Gary until fall. I’m always sad to see them end but after 4 solid days of shooting and instruction I look forward to getting back home. Mother nature provided an amazing variety of weather conditions that made for some very interesting, and often challenging, shooting. We went from sunshine and moonbows on Monday, to rain, snow and some hail by Thursday.
Similar to the winter workshop, after awakening to a fresh blanket of snow in the valley, Gary and I had to switch from photography instructors to slave drivers. Spring snows seldom last in Yosemite so we rushed the group to as many locations as possible in a race against sunlight and rising temperatures. I shot this in Cook’s Meadow, near the base of Yosemite falls. Even though the sun had barely crested the ridge, the layer of snow on the meadow was already starting to disappear.
Rather than shoot the standard composition from this location, featuring Half Dome, I opted for something that spoke to the morning and the conditions. I dropped my tripod legs down to their lowest position and composed this fairly wide shot with my Canon 24-70 at 30mm. I felt that close snow in the foreground was important to the essence of the scene. I also wanted the sun to appear as a starburst so I placed the camera where it was almost entirely in shade. At 30mm f/8 would have given me plenty of depth of field but I chose f/20 because of the effect on the sun. The recipe for a starburst is pretty simple: narrow point light source + small aperture == starburst.
Students frequently ask what aperture I use. For many scenes, that answer is f/8 or f/11. I also tell them that I rarely go above f/16 unless I have a special reason, because of complications that can arise from diffraction. This, however, is one such exception.
Cheers
Fire and life
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on July 6, 2009
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Fire in Yosemite, or just about any other wild place, is a fact of life. Lightning and fire is natures way of taking out the trash. In our urbanized culture we see fire as a destroyer of life and property. In nature, while there is loss of life, fire is a birth process. The problem with our perception is that we operate on a different time scale than most of what we see around us. For the trees in the forest our little ~80 year life span is just a blink.
I spent a couple of days in Yosemite just prior to the Independence Day holiday. There are, as of this post, two wildfires burning in the park. While I rarely venture into the valley during the summer because of the crowds, I do still appreciate the view. Friday afternoon my wife and I hiked out to Dewey Point to have lunch. There was so much smoke that Half Dome was only a faint grey outline. It was still a good hike but it would have been nicer with a view to reward us.
I took this image a couple of years ago. It was from a stretch of Highway 41, North of the Glacier point road. The area had been burned, roughly a decade ago, but in that short length of time was already bursting with new growth. I’d driven by the area several times thinking, to myself, that there was a picture hiding there somewhere. The sky was grey, from some management fires in the valley, so I choose to exclude it. What struck me was the contrast of color. The green undergrowth, the yellow of the Elm, the gold of the Oak, the bright pink of the Dogwood all contrasted against the stark grey and black of the, still standing, burned forest. Color vs monochrome. Life vs death. Read the rest of this entry »
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