by Michael Frye | Mar 14, 2013 | Light and Weather, Vision and Creativity
Sunlight slanting across Crane Flat Meadow, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
A Trip to Crane Flat
Yosemite got some much-needed precipitation last week – over an inch total. I kept checking the radar and satellite images online, looking for an opportunity to photograph a clearing storm. Friday morning seemed promising, so I drove up to Yosemite Valley early, but found no snow. It looked like the snow level had been around 5,000 feet, higher than forecast. Worse, from a photographic perspective, the skies were clear and there was no mist.
Shortly after sunrise I noticed light striking a ridge near the tunnels on Highway 120, and on a whim decided to drive up to Crane Flat. I thought Crane Flat would at least have some fresh snow, since it’s at 6,000 feet.
Indeed there was fresh snow – over a foot of it. I parked at the Tuolumne Grove trailhead and walked along the plowed road. The sun had just reached parts of the main meadow, and I found some interesting small subjects to photograph, like tree-shadows on the snow.
Some shafts of sunlight slanting across the snow caught my attention, and then some mist began rising near the edge of the meadow, behind the shafts of light. I immediately recognized the potential to make an image that went beyond an abstract study of shadows – a photograph that had a mood.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 11, 2012 | Light and Weather
Sunbeams in the redwood forest
Last year I spent a magical day among foggy redwoods and rhododendrons along the northern California coast, and captured some of my favorite redwood photographs to date. You can see some of those photos here and here.
Claudia and I recently returned from another trip to the redwoods. On our first morning we went to the same area we visited last year, but the fog wasn’t as extensive, and not as many rhododendrons were blooming. We kept hiking, and finally reached some mist, and then something magical happened: the fog began to lift, and sunbeams started filtering through the trees. I captured the “Close Encounters” photograph below, then huffed up a steep trail to the top of a ridge and made the image at the top of this post, with classic godbeams radiating through the trees, then hurried back down, chasing the receding edge of the fog, where I found the scene in the second photograph below.
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by Michael Frye | Mar 29, 2012 | Light and Weather, Photography Tips
Mossy oak in the rain
Claudia and I are in Humboldt County this week visiting our son Kevin, who’s a junior at Humboldt State University. This is redwood country, along the far northern coast of California. It’s a temperate rain forest, and it sure seems like it this week. It’s been raining—a lot. Yesterday we had a break, and a mostly rain-free day, but another storm arrived today, and the area is expected to get six to ten inches of rain over the next two days.
Although we’re mainly here to visit our son, of course I hoped to do some photography in this beautiful area as well. The main challenge of photographing in the rain is keeping the camera dry. I’ve tried many different ways of doing this: umbrellas, towels, plastic bags, etc, but there’s no perfect solution. Various people make rain covers for cameras, which work pretty well, but only for telephoto lenses. In fact it’s a lot easier to photograph with long lenses in the rain, regardless of what kind of cover you put over the camera, because you can use a long lens hood to keep rain off the front glass. Hoods for wide-angle lenses have to be short, to avoid vignetting, which makes it difficult to keep water from splashing onto the front element. The best solution I’ve found for wide-angle lenses is to attach an umbrella to my tripod with a clamp. This works, but it’s awkward.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 21, 2011 | Light and Weather, Yosemite Photo Conditions
Sun breaking through mist, Tuolumne Meadows, last Friday morning
Landscape photographers have to be flexible. You can try to plan—to be at a certain place at a certain time when you expect the light to be just right. But you can’t control the weather, and the best-laid plans of photographers often fizzle behind a bank of clouds.
So when things don’t pan out the way you’d hoped, you have to adapt. We did a lot of adapting last week during my Hidden Yosemite workshop. With our heavy winter and late spring, there was still a lot of snow at higher elevations. Certain areas were just inaccessible; the Saddlebag Lake road, for example, was closed, and I heard the lake was still mostly covered in ice.
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by Michael Frye | Feb 9, 2010 | Light and Weather
Sunrise from Tunnel View, Sunday morning
In my last post I wished for the storm to clear right around sunset on Sunday. It didn’t quite work out that way—it cleared at sunrise instead. My private workshop student and I photographed a beautiful sunrise from Tunnel View, then moved to Cathedral Beach and Swinging Bridge. I always hope for mist, as it adds so much mystery and mood to photographs of Yosemite Valley. Sunday we had almost too much mist; massive cliffs like El Capitan were completely obscured for long stretches of time. But I’m not complaining! It was a great morning.
But where were all the photographers? We saw only a few other tripods all morning—and it was a weekend. Maybe they’re all waiting to come next week for Horsetail Fall.
