by Michael Frye | Apr 9, 2017 | Travels and Stories
Endless flowers, Carrizo Plain National Monument. This was a very contrasty scene, so I bracketed five frames, each two stops apart, and blended them with Lightroom’s HDR Merge. Normally I would try to capture a photograph like this when just the edge of the sun first peeked over the horizon, in order to avoid lens flare. I did that here, but then kept shooting, knowing that the sun needed to get above the horizon to light the foreground flowers. In this image, made about two minutes after the sun first appeared, the sun was high enough to create some beautiful backlight on the flowers, but luckily there was still no flare. 22mm, f/16, 100 ISO
“The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains.” — John Muir
“The Great Central Plain of California, during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step.” — John Muir
The once-vast flower beds of California’s Central Valley that Muir described were paved over and plowed under a long time ago. Yet there is a small corner of California that, in a good year, still resembles Muir’s descriptions: the Carrizo Plain.
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by Michael Frye | Apr 7, 2017 | Composition
Sunset and badlands, Death Valley NP, CA, USA
I love the sand dunes in Death Valley. As I wrote in this recent post, they’re like a giant visual playground, with lines, curves, patterns, and textures everywhere.
But there’s more to Death Valley than dunes. It’s a big place (the largest national park in the lower 48 states), and it takes time to explore this vast area, but photogenic landscapes abound.
One of the most striking features of Death Valley is the lack of vegetation. Now don’t get me wrong – Death Valley has a wonderful and diverse array of plants. Some years bring great flower displays, and you can even find limber pines and bristlecone pines at the highest elevations. But there are also vast areas of naked earth. In the badlands, or out on the salt flats, you can see large swaths of ground with scarcely a shrub or blade of grass. This is landscape photography at it’s most elemental, with only bare earth and sky as subjects. You can concentrate on the patterns, textures, forms, and colors of the rocks and minerals themselves, unobscured by vegetation.
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by Michael Frye | Mar 28, 2017 | Night Photography, Travels and Stories
Zodiacal light over Manly Beacon and a dust storm, Death Valley NP, CA, USA
On the last night of our Death Valley workshop we went down into Golden Canyon, preparing to capture a star-trail sequence above Manly Beacon. As the skies grew darker we noticed a low cloud in the main valley, behind the Beacon. It looked like fog or mist, but that didn’t make sense, since there hadn’t been any recent rain, and, well, we were in Death Valley, the driest place in North America. So we figured it had to be a dust storm.
It was gusty in Golden Canyon, but not windy enough to create a dust storm. Clearly, however, it was windier in the main valley. And the dust cloud seemed to be moving our way. We debated whether to leave or stick it out. It didn’t seem likely that the dust cloud would reach us, so we decided to wait a bit longer, and then a bit longer again.
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by Michael Frye | Mar 26, 2017 | Composition
Goldfields and monkeyflowers, Red Rock Canyon SP, California, USA
We just spent a week in Death Valley teaching a workshop, and had a great time, despite some windy conditions. On our way home last Thursday Claudia and I stopped at Red Rock Canyon State Park (just north of Mojave), and found some beautiful patches of flowers. I’ve included my favorite image of the afternoon here, with goldfields and two species of monkeyflowers underneath the rock formations the park is famous for.
This composition is built around the two yellow monkeyflowers about a third of the way up from the bottom of the frame. When I spotted these two flowers I knew they would provide a great focal point – something for the viewer’s eyes to latch onto before roaming through the colorful mass of blossoms behind them to the red rocks beyond.
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by Michael Frye | Mar 13, 2017 | Announcements
Sunset over Yosemite Valley with Cathedral Rocks, El Capitan, and Horsetail Fall, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
When I posted this photograph of Horsetail Fall and the sunset over Yosemite Valley a couple of weeks ago, many people asked about purchasing prints. Well I’m happy to announce that The Ansel Adams Gallery has decided to offer this image at a discounted price as part of their “Unique Offer” series. For a limited time you can get signed, numbered, matted, limited-edition prints of this photograph at 25% off the normal price, in three different sizes: 13×20, 16×24, and 20×30. My 13×20 prints normally sell for $325, but during this sale they are only $244. The retail price for my 16×24 prints is usually $475, but for a limited time they’re only $356. And while my 20×30 prints are normally priced at $750, during this sale they’re $562.
The sale lasts one week, ending at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 19th. Visit the Ansel Adams Gallery website to purchase a print or get more details.
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