In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Dec 31, 2024 | Announcements
Happy New Year! Once again I’m inviting you, my faithful blog readers, to help me choose my best photographs from the past year. I’ve posted 45 of my favorite images from 2024 below, in chronological order. After you look through these, please use the form at the bottom of this post to list your ten favorites.
The voting deadline is midnight Pacific Time this Saturday, January 4th. Voting has closed.
You don’t have to list your ten favorites in any order; just pick up to ten images. Once the votes are in I’ll post the top ten or twelve on this blog. (The number for each photo is in the caption underneath the photograph. Also, you can click on the images to see them larger.)
As always, I reserve the right to override the votes if one of my favorites gets panned. But I’ve rarely had to exercise this power because my readers have excellent taste. 🙂
Thanks for your input — I appreciate your help!
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by Michael Frye | Dec 22, 2024 | Light and Weather
Fog and sunbeams, Sierra Nevada foothills, California. I made this image Wednesday morning, after the sun rose high enough to rake across these layers of fog and trees. In color it was all one note, with everything a pale gold color. Since it was monochromatic anyway, I tried it in black and white, and liked that much better. I think the color distracted from the main story of the photograph, which is about the layers, patterns of light and dark, and tree shadows. 321mm, 1/200 sec. at f/11, ISO 100.
California’s Central Valley is often filled with fog in winter. Usually a shallow layer of fog forms during the night, then burns off the next morning as the sun warms the air. There’s a temporary, low-level inversion during the night and early morning, where the air near the ground is cooler than the air higher up, but when the sun penetrates the fog and warms the ground the inversion ends.
Sometimes, however, the fog in the Central Valley is so thick it doesn’t burn off. The weak sunlight on short winter days never penetrates the fog layer completely, so the fog lasts all day, and into the next night. If the fog persists for a couple of days the inversion will grow deeper (it can get up to two- or three-thousand feet deep), and the fog will gradually lift off the ground into a low overcast, or stratus deck. And then that higher-altitude fog layer will push up into the Sierra foothills. A stratus deck like this can last for several days, or even a week, until a disturbance in the atmosphere (like a storm, or even a weak, dry front) mixes the air and ends the inversion.
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by Michael Frye | Dec 15, 2024 | Advanced Techniques, Composition
Ice fingers, Yosemite NP, California. 400mm, 1 second at f/16, ISO 100; 18 focus-stacked frames blended with Helicon Focus Pro. I needed to photograph this detail at an angle to get the orange reflections, requiring focus-stacking to get everything sharp. (It’s a reflection of a cliff lit by the setting sun.)
Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday two smaller storms moved through the Sierra, bringing rain and higher-elevation snow. But for a couple of weeks before that it had been dry and warm – reaching the upper 60s at our house in Mariposa.
Early last week, as we were starting our workshop in Yosemite Valley, temperatures cooled off a bit, allowing ice to form along the banks of the Merced River. It’s always fun to photograph ice like this, with its beautiful patterns, designs, and colors. But it can be challenging, both technically and creatively.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 11, 2024 | Light and Weather
Sunset clouds, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite NP, California. Light from the setting sun caught some virga (rain that doesn’t reach the ground) falling from a passing thunderstorm.
I’ve been lucky to live in or near Yosemite for the last 40 years. It’s such a wonderful place. And for about five months of the year, when the Tioga Road is open, I can easily get up to the cool, uncrowded, beautiful high country. It’s always a treat to breathe the thin, pine-scented air while hiking to a secluded alpine lake, or a field of wildflowers.
Last year the Tioga Road didn’t open until July 22nd, its latest opening date ever, which limited the time we got to spend in the high country. But this year Claudia and I got to hang out up there for extended periods before, during, and after our Starry Skies and Range of Light workshops. While not at the record levels like 2023, we did have a good snowpack this year, keeping the water levels high in the creeks and rivers, and creating some nice wildflower displays. We also saw monsoonal moisture sometimes pushing up into the mountains, creating clouds, showers, and thunderstorms, which makes things exciting – and makes for interesting photographs. In other words, it was really beautiful.
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by Michael Frye | Mar 17, 2024 | Light and Weather
Half Dome and sunbeams, winter sunrise, Yosemite NP, California
I’ve felt like a hamster on a wheel lately, running nonstop just to keep up with the most essential tasks. But I finally have a moment to breathe, and time to write a blog post!
I made the photographs here in mid-February, after a weak storm moved through the Sierra. In a common pattern, it rained in Yosemite Valley during most of the storm, but the temperature dropped at the tail-end, leaving a dusting of new snow. At least that’s what I saw on the webcams early that morning. But when I arrived in the west end of the valley at first light, I didn’t find any new snow. Could it have snowed in the east end of the valley (where the webcams are), but not the west end? Sure enough, that’s what happened. The east end of the valley is slightly higher in elevation than the west end, and sometimes that’s enough to create a dusting of snow in the east end while the west end gets only rain.
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