by Michael Frye | Mar 12, 2015 | Composition
Clouds and reflections, Tenaya Lake, Yosemite
Does every landscape photograph need a foreground? Not always. Some of the world’s most memorable landscape photographs lack any foreground – like Moon and Half Dome by Ansel Adams, or Galen Rowell’s Last Light on Horsetail Fall (go to page 2).
On the other hand, many classic landscape images do have foregrounds – prominent ones – like another Ansel Adams photograph, Mount Williamson from Manzanar, or many images by landscape master David Muench.
So how do you know when to include a foreground in your own landscapes? Ask yourself these questions:
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by Michael Frye | Feb 24, 2015 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Redbud along the Merced River, Merced River Canyon, March 2013
February has been exceptionally warm, so I probably shouldn’t be surprised to see signs of spring already. But redbuds? In February? Apparently so. Claudia drove up to Yosemite Valley on Saturday, and reported seeing redbuds and a few poppies blooming in the Merced River Canyon west of the park. It’s not unusual to see poppies in late February, but the redbuds are a month early. Claudia said that only a couple of them were in full bloom, but many more were starting.
Temperatures dropped significantly over the weekend, and I’m not sure how that will affect the redbuds, or the poppies. Under normal circumstances the redbuds would continue to progress, and reach peak in perhaps a week or so. But these aren’t normal circumstances, so all bets are off.
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by Michael Frye | Jan 29, 2015 | Photography Tips
Ponderosa pines in mist, El Capitan Meadow, Yosemite
Natural light comes in an infinite variety of beautiful flavors. I love them all, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be backlight, because it consistently delivers some of the most interesting images. All of the photographs from my last two posts, the ones from above the fog layer, were made with the camera pointing toward the sun. The photograph above, one I haven’t posted here before, captures a moment when backlit mist rose into the pines in Yosemite’s El Capitan Meadow. This next image, voted my top photograph of 2014, was also lit from behind, with the sun just above the frame:
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by Michael Frye | Jan 26, 2015 | Vision and Creativity
Sunrise above a fog layer, Sierra Nevada foothills, Thursday morning; focal length was 75mm
As I mentioned in my last post, the fog display on Thursday morning might have been even better than Wednesday morning. It didn’t look very promising at first. There was no fog at our house, and none in Mariposa either, so I knew I had to go lower. Claudia was with me this time, and we decided to take a back road that headed west into the lower foothills. At one point we crested a ridge, and there, below us, was the sea of fog.
Again I was fortunate to find a good viewpoint looking toward the southeast. This time there was a layer of high clouds above the fog, already starting to turn color with the sunrise. Best of all, a double-peaked hill was poking up out of the fog in that direction. The image at the top of this post is an early one from that morning, with a brilliant sunrise above the fog and hills.
After the sun rose, the fog lifted into some nearby ridges, getting high enough to almost – but not quite – obscure that double-peaked hill. Soft backlight filtered through the high clouds, bringing out beautiful textures in the fog (see the two images below).
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by Michael Frye | Jan 25, 2015 | Light and Weather, Vision and Creativity
Fog and southern Sierra peaks from Mt. Bullion at sunrise, Mariposa County, Wednesday morning
After the episode of dense fog in the Central Valley that I mentioned in my last post, the fog lifted into what meteorologists call a stratus deck last week – essentially a layer of fog that’s slightly above ground level. From the Central Valley the stratus deck would look like a low overcast. If you were to drive out of the valley into the Sierra, you’d climb into the clouds, and into a layer of fog, and then eventually get above the fog and into sunshine. And if you could find a hill or ridge that rose above the stratus deck, you’d be able to look out over a sea of fog.
That sight should be familiar to people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, or anywhere along the California Coast. When I lived in the Bay Area in the early ’80s, I remember driving along Skyline Drive on the Peninsula and looking out to the west over a sea of fog covering the ocean. At that time my interest in photography was in its infancy, but it was a beautiful sight. I’ve had that mental image in my mind ever since, and have long wanted to make photographs from above a sea of fog.
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