In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog

North Lake Sunset

Sunset clouds over North Lake, autumn, Inyo NF, CA, USA

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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Early Autumn Color

Aspens, reeds, and reflections, Bishop Creek Canyon, Inyo NF, CA, USA

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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Moonrise, Moonset

Moon rising above Mono Lake and the White Mountains at sunset, CA, USA

Moon rising above Mono Lake and the White Mountains at sunset, CA, USA

We had a wonderful time during our workshop in the Sierra high country last week. The locations around Tuolumne Meadows, Tioga Pass, and Mono Lake are some of my favorites, and we had a great group of people to share them with. We also had several opportunities to photograph the rising and setting moon above these striking landscapes.

In this previous post I wrote about some of the common misconceptions about photographing the full moon. For example, many people assume that full-moon photographs are taken at night, but in fact most are taken at sunrise or sunset when the light of the moon and landscape are in balance. And it’s often better to take these photographs on the days before or after the actual full moon, not when the calendar says “full moon.” That post helps explain some of the gyrations of the sun and moon so you can understand the best times to photograph the moon above a landscape. There are also some excellent apps that can help you pin down precisely where and when the moon will rise and set. The best of these are PhotoPills and The Photographer’s Ephemeris, and I used both to figure out where and when to take our group during the workshop.

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Along the Klamath River

Foggy sunrise along the Klamath River, Redwood NP, CA, USA

Foggy sunrise along the Klamath River, Redwood NP, CA, USA

Claudia and I are in Crescent City scouting for our upcoming redwoods workshop. I love coming back here. The lush forests and wild coast are such a contrast to our mountain home in the central Sierra. The subjects here allow me to try some alternative techniques and approaches to photographing the landscape, but above all I’m trying to convey the feeling of this area, which is very different from Yosemite. The Sierra Nevada, or “The Range of Light,” as John Muir put it, seems like a bright, new, shiny jewel to me, while the temperate rainforests of northern California have a primeval mood that makes you feel as if you’ve traveled back in time a few million years.

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North America

North America

While I love Yosemite and the Sierra, it’s nice to sometimes venture further afield. We live on an amazingly beautiful planet, and my home continent has boundless opportunities to experience and photograph the natural world – more than enough to keep me occupied until I can’t pick up a camera anymore.

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