In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Aug 6, 2014 | Composition, Vision and Creativity
Wildflower island and cascade, eastern Sierra; 100mm, 1/2 sec. at f/16, 100 ISO
It’s been an interesting summer in the Sierra. Last winter was one of the driest on record, but over the last month or so we’ve seen a steady flow of monsoonal moisture flowing up from the southeast, leading to frequent afternoon showers and thunderstorms over the higher elevations. We even heard about an epic deluge two or three weeks ago that flooded the parking lot and some of the tent cabins at the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge.
That extra moisture has kept the streams flowing and flowers blooming in the high country longer than I would have expected. On Saturday Claudia and I hiked up one of the eastern Sierra canyons and found a pretty series of cascades, with an island of late-summer flowers in the middle.
Although I make my share of black-and-white photographs, I’ve always been attracted to color. I often look for color, then try to build a composition around it. As I tell my workshop students, color isn’t enough – you need to find a design to go with that color.
In this case, that design proved to be elusive. The most obvious composition was a wide-angle view with a patch of flowers at the bottom, and the upper cascade above. But there was a distracting pile of logs at the base of the cascade that cluttered the image, with no obvious way to eliminate or minimize the logs. I have nothing against logs, but in this case I was interested in the flowers and water, and the logs broke up the visual flow between the flowers and water, diluting the photograph’s message:
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by Michael Frye | Jul 30, 2014 | Vision and Creativity
Sun rising through smoke from Tunnel View, 7/28/14, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
Early Monday morning I drove up to Yosemite Valley, hoping that smoke from the El Portal and Dark Hole fires might create some interesting atmospheric effects. Yes, I went looking for smoke, something that photographers usually avoid. But smoke can impart a wonderful, ethereal quality to photographs – like fog, but with more color.
At Tunnel View the smoke was thick enough to give the scene a misty, painterly look, but not so thick that you couldn’t see anything. Eventually the orange ball of the sun appeared through the smoke, accompanied by a patterned cloud formation (above). Later, along the Merced River, the smoke lent a similar painterly mood to scenes of El Capitan and Three Brothers (below). And much later, near sunset, the sun turned into an orange ball again as it sunk into the smoke to the west (below).
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by Michael Frye | Jul 27, 2014 | Announcements
El Portal Fire from the Glacier Point Road; 1:51 a.m., 7/27/14
We had no inkling that anything was wrong until we reached Crane Flat, where a ranger told us the road down to Yosemite Valley was closed.
Claudia had said that the wildflowers were nice in the Yosemite high country, so we decided to go for a hike up there yesterday afternoon. We drove through El Portal sometime between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m. and continued up the Big Oak Flat Road to Crane Flat. Everything seemed normal. Near Yosemite Creek we passed the Dark Hole Fire. This is a lightning-caused fire that the park service is letting burn, but it looked pretty active yesterday afternoon, with a big smoke plume.
We continued on past Tuolumne Meadows, started our hike, and found some gorgeous wildflowers (you can see a photograph below). Then we returned to the car, and started home at about 10 p.m. Near Yosemite Creek I decided to stop and photograph the Dark Hole Fire (below), then we continued west back to Crane Flat, where we saw a ranger vehicle blocking the road down to Yosemite Valley.
We were surprised that the road was closed, since we’d just driven up it a few hours earlier. The ranger let us through, since we had a park sticker, but he told us there was no stopping, and to watch out for fire crews. Fire crews? We knew these crews weren’t for the Dark Hole Fire, as that was miles away, and still pretty small. What had happened?
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by Michael Frye | Jul 17, 2014 | Photography Tips
Moon setting over Tenaya Lake, Saturday morning, 5:42 a.m.
“I have always been mindful of Edward Weston’s remark, ‘If I wait for something here I may lose something better over there.’ I have found that keeping on the move is generally more rewarding.”
— Ansel Adams
Sooner or later, every landscape photographer has to decide whether to stay put and hope that the light gets better, or move somewhere else.
Last Saturday morning, on the last day of my Hidden Yosemite workshop with The Ansel Adams Gallery, we rose early and drove to Tenaya Lake to capture the moon setting over the water. On our way there we noticed low-lying mist in Tuolumne Meadows. We photographed a beautiful moonset over the lake, but as soon as the moon dropped below the ridge we drove back to Tuolumne.
The mist was still there. First we ran out to a small pond to catch the sun lighting some small clouds above the high peaks to the east. Then we spotted a herd of deer off to the left in the mist, so we quickly changed lenses and photographed them until they moved away.
By then the sun was hitting Unicorn Peak, so we walked about a hundred feet north to get a reflection of the peak in the pond, and waited until the sun grazed across the foreground.
Then light started hitting the mist and trees behind us, so we moved again to get closer, and put the sun behind trees where we could see sunbeams and starbursts.
And then the sun rose higher, the mist disappeared, and the show was over. The whole sequence lasted about 40 minutes.
In this case, the light and fog were changing quickly, so we had to switch lenses and move our feet if we wanted to catch those fleeting moments. But three years ago, during the same workshop, a similar situation required waiting patiently for the light to change.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 8, 2014 | Light and Weather, Travels and Stories
Sunrise at South Tufa, Mono Lake, Monday morning
Claudia and I have been in Lee Vining, on the eastern side of the Sierra, preparing for my Hidden Yosemite workshop. The weather over Mono Lake the last few days has been really interesting and moody, with some light showers, rainbows, and skies full of beautifully-textured clouds. In between scouting and setting up we’ve photographed a couple of sunsets and a sunrise at the lake, and I’ve included some of the images here.
The last photo might be the most unusual rainbow I’ve ever seen. Claudia, my workshop assistant Kirk Keeler, and I were walking out of the Whoa Nellie Deli after dinner last night when we spotted a rainbow. We drove quickly toward the lake, where we found a short, vivid section of the rainbow over a zigzag shoreline. The rainbow was formed by the sun poking through a small hole in the clouds and hitting a rain squall, which made it look like the rainbow was suspended in space and creating a sunbeam.
Forecasts call for similar weather over the next few days, so I’m looking forward to a great week with our group!
— Michael Frye
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