by Michael Frye | Sep 8, 2016 | Critiques
Yosemite Valley View by Srinivasa Punnamraju
The Photo Critique Series is not dead! It just took a long vacation. 🙂 This time we’ll look at a photograph by Srinivasa Punnamraju from Tunnel View in Yosemite.
Light and Weather
Srinivasa was lucky to catch some dramatic weather at Yosemite’s most iconic location, Tunnel View. There were plenty of interesting clouds overhead, and some nice mottled patterns of light and dark on the cliffs – especially the striped bands on El Capitan to the left.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 7, 2016 | Night Photography
Jeffrey pine and the Milky Way, Yosemite NP, CA
We conducted two more workshops last week, our second editions this summer of the Inside Bodie and Starry Skies Adventure workshops. We had a lot of fun once again, with great conditions and really nice people.
I made this photo on the first night of our Starry Skies workshop near Olmsted Point in Yosemite. Several members of our group and I framed views of this photogenic Jeffrey pine with the Milky Way and Half Dome in the distance. We made some exposures with just starlight, then tried to light the tree with a flashlight. Later we did some more complex lighting, but I ended up liking this simple version with just one flashlight aimed at the tree. We used a homemade snoot on the flashlight to narrow the beam and prevent too much light from spilling onto the rocks below the tree.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 28, 2016 | Night Photography
Star trails over the Methodist Church, Bodie State Historic Park, CA, USA
We’ve been able to take workshop groups into Bodie at night several times in recent years, which is always a lot of fun. But I’d never captured star trails there, mainly because star trails take a long time, and I’d wanted to spend my limited time there doing other things with the class. But during our last night session there a couple of the participants and I decided to try photographing what’s become a Bodie classic – star trails over the Methodist Church. The church works perfectly for this because you can line up the steeple with the North Star and create concentric circles overhead.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 21, 2016 | Composition, Vision and Creativity
McMillan House interior, Bodie State Historic Park, California. The high contrast of this scene required using Lightroom’s HDR Merge. Also, I deliberately avoided having sunlit areas touch the borders of the image. A bright spot along the edge would pull the viewer’s eye out of the photograph.
As I’ve explored this place, I’ve realized that I’m not as interested in the abandoned mining equipment and machinery, as fascinating as some of those things are. I’m drawn more to the places where people once ate and slept and drank and socialized, and left behind the artifacts of their lives – furniture, cooking utensils, books, magazines, pictures, cans, bottles, a baby carriage, a bird cage, sewing machines, coats, pants, hats, shoes…
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by Michael Frye | Aug 16, 2016 | Night Photography
Moon setting over an alpine lake, Yosemite, 1:00 a.m. Friday morning
After our trip to the Alabama Hills Claudia and I drove back up to Yosemite, and on Thursday night we hiked up to an alpine lake to view the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Knowing that the moon wouldn’t set until nearly 1:00 a.m., we didn’t start hiking until well after dark, and arrived at the lake around 12:30 a.m.
The moon setting over the lake was a beautiful sight. As the moon sank lower it turned orange, just like the setting sun. It also became dimmer, so the stars came out. The extreme contrast made photographing this scene difficult, but when the moon reached a point right above the horizon the contrast dropped just enough, and I was able to capture the image above. In many ways this looks just like a sunset photograph – except for the sky full of stars.
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