by Michael Frye | Oct 6, 2016 | Composition, Light and Weather
Sunrise on Mt. Whitney from the Alabama Hills, CA, USA
On our trip to the eastern Sierra last week Claudia and I made a detour down to the Alabama Hills. This area is a bit further from home than our usual eastside haunts, so we don’t go there often, and I sometimes forget how amazing it is. The jumbled rocks of the Alabama Hills are interesting and photogenic in their own right, but combined with the abrupt escarpment of the mountains to the west… well it’s just spectacular.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 2, 2016 | Digital Darkroom, Yosemite Photo Conditions
Sunset clouds over North Lake, autumn, Inyo NF, CA, USA
Claudia and I are back home, but we had fun photographing on the east side last week. Every day we saw more color in Bishop Creek Canyon, and the high-elevation aspens were looking great when we left yesterday.
I made this photograph Friday evening. We had been photographing intimate scenes along the south fork of Bishop Creek for a couple of hours, but there were some clouds hugging the crest of the mountains, so I headed to North Lake where I could get a wider view if the clouds turned color at sunset.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 28, 2016 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Aspens, reeds, and reflections, Bishop Creek Canyon, Inyo NF, CA, USA
Claudia and I are over on the eastern side of the Sierra checking out the early fall color. The high-elevation aspens typically start turning over here in late September, and they’re right on schedule, or maybe even a little early compared to some years. We drove up Bishop Creek Canyon yesterday, and found lots of color near the 9,000-foot level around Lake Sabrina and North Lake. I’d say these areas are near peak already, with a few bare trees, and some green, but probably 70 to 80 percent of the aspens turning.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 22, 2016 | Composition
Rocks and reflections along the shore of Tenaya Lake, Yosemite. This image features both curves and circles.
I really like curved lines. I was reminded of this last weekend when my friend Mike Osborne showed me some of his junkyard abstracts on his iPad. All the photographs were wonderful and imaginative, but the ones I liked best often had curves. And many of my own favorite photographs have curves too. Curves look organic, and sensuous, and add a certain visual flow to a photograph that’s hard to generate without them.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 11, 2016 | Night Photography
DeChambeau Hotel and I.O.O.F. Hall at night, Bodie State Historic Park, CA, USA
On the last night of our recent Starry Skies Adventure workshop we went to Bodie, which is always a great place for night photography. As the Milky Way moved into the southwest that evening it lined up well with these two buildings along Main Street, the DeChambeau Hotel and I.O.O.F. (Independent Order of Odd Fellows) Hall. I had never photographed this view of Bodie before so decided to try it, and was joined by several other people in the workshop.
I knew the lighting would be complicated, but that’s part of the fun of photographing Bodie at night. You can do relatively simple light-painting there, or, if you’re up for a challenge, try something complex. Here we wanted make it look as if the buildings were lit from the inside (even though the interiors were locked and inaccessible to us). That’s not really hard to do – just shine flashlights through the windows. The hard part was figuring out how to keep yourself out of the frame while doing so. The solution was to do each part of the lighting in a separate frame, and then mask off the unwanted areas of that frame (like a person holding a flashlight) in Photoshop.
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