In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Dec 31, 2018 | Announcements
(I’ve closed comments on this post, since the voting deadline has passed. You can see the final selections here. Thanks to all of you who voted!)
Happy New Year!
It’s become a New Year’s tradition on this blog to pick my best images from the past year, and once again I’m inviting you to help me make these difficult choices. I’ve posted 40 of my best photographs from 2018 below, in chronological order. After you look through these, please post a comment listing your ten favorites.
You don’t have to list your ten favorites in any order, or even name them – just numbers will do. (The numbers are in the captions underneath the photographs. Also, you can click on the images to see them larger.) Once the votes are in I’ll post the top ten or twelve on this blog, and submit the final group to Jim Goldstein’s blog project, where he’ll be showcasing the best images of the year from over 300 photographers.
The voting deadline is this Wednesday, January 2nd, at midnight Pacific time.
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by Michael Frye | Dec 20, 2018 | Light and Weather
Oak tree above a fog layer, Mariposa County, California. 150mm, 20 seconds at f/16, ISO 50.
Fog in California’s Central Valley will occasionally lift into what meteorologists call a stratus deck, where fog rises above the valley floor and settles into a low layer of clouds. From the floor of the Central Valley it looks like a low overcast, but if you drive into the Sierra foothills you’ll climb into the fog, and then above it.
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you know that I love fog. It’s highly photogenic stuff. Fog here in the foothills is much less common than in the Central Valley, so it always piques my interest, giving me a rare opportunity to photograph some of the numerous, beautiful, foothill oaks in the fog, and even better, a chance to get above the fog. If conditions are right, I can sometimes climb a peak or ridge where I can look out over a sea of fog, with the peaks of the Sierra to the east, and nothing visible in any other direction except the cloud tops.
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by Michael Frye | Dec 16, 2018 | Light and Weather
Pines, oak, and mist, Yosemite, Thanksgiving weekend. 70mm, 1/45th of a second at f/16, ISO 100.
Over Thanksgiving weekend I photographed a beautiful, misty morning in Yosemite Valley (see this previous post). Looking through my photographs later I realized that almost every one was backlit. And that made sense, as mist looks wonderful with backlight. So do other translucent objects like clouds, leaves, grasses, flowers, raindrops, and so forth.
Translucent, backlit objects stand out best against a dark background. And that’s one of the great, overlooked features about photographing in Yosemite Valley: you can often use the cliffs as a dark backdrop. It’s like draping a giant black cloth behind your subject.
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by Michael Frye | Dec 2, 2018 | Light and Weather
El Capitan and the Merced River at sunset yesterday evening
Several storms rolled through here last week. The largest of those dropped over two inches of rain in Yosemite Valley, and left a dusting of snow on the Valley floor Friday morning, but I couldn’t get up there early that day because Highway 140 was closed by mud and rock slides in the burn scar from the Ferguson Fire.
A smaller but colder storm was due to arrive Saturday, this time promising a chance for more significant snow. By noon Friday all the roads into the Valley had reopened, so I took a detailed look at the weather forecasts to see when this next storm might clear. Most of the information seemed to point to a clearing sometime after sunset on Saturday. But there was one item in the Hourly Weather Forecast on the National Weather Service website that hinted that the storm might clear before sunset. This graph showed sky cover (cloud cover) staying at 77% until 9:00 p.m., then dropping to 40% by 10:00 p.m. – well after dark. But the line showing precipitation potential dropped abruptly from 90% at 2:00 p.m. to 40% at 3:00 p.m. Hmm. Here’s what that looked like:
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by Michael Frye | Nov 15, 2018 | Announcements
Glacier Point Sunset, Yosemite
Just a quick reminder that the holiday print sale ends tomorrow (Friday, November 16th) at midnight Pacific time, so you still have time to get 25% off on three images: Glacier Point Sunset, Yosemite; Milky Way over Sand Dunes, Death Valley; and Aspens and Ferns, Kebler Pass, Colorado.
In case you missed the earlier post, you can see the available sizes and sale prices underneath the descriptions of each image below.
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