Good Morning Yosemite
by Lon Overacker
Thanks for your comments on my previous image. Excellent observations.
Here is another from the same morning, about 1.5 hours later. I was up so early I had time to visit 2 iconic viewpoints! AND even made it back to Tunnel view for the actual sunrise.
I took some suggestions from the previous post and kept the sky a bit darker, even though this is closer to sunrise; also there was less influence from the full moon because of the clouds/fog and also the moon had dropped lower towards the horizon by now.
This is cropped to a pano since I didn't execute good enough to get any detail in the river and foreground from this spot. (It was still quite dark anyway.) for me, these night/star images are kind of an novelty. I don't get overly excited about night images, although I can say with certainty that the experience of being alone under the stars, a full moon, clearing storm... in Yosemite... IS the experience, the camera is there at these hours simply to pass the time... ;-)
Hope this one works a little better and comes closer to representing the time of day and conditions. Your thoughts, critiques and suggestions are always welcome.
Lon
oh, forgot to mention. I didn't notice til now, but I like how the clouds "roughly" mimic the profile of the valley.
Comments
6 commentsEd
I don't have much experience with these really long exposures and am not sure how I feel about what they do to clouds. I came across a photographer shooting an image at Oregon's Sparks Lake. We started talking about places to shoot and equipment, etc. He finally looks at his watch and tells me that he has 10 minutes to go. Turns out during all this time he was making a single long exposure. He claimed that that was the champagne of image taking. He had this virtually black filter that allowed him to make 45 minute exposures.
In this image it would have been nice if the cloud/fog hadn't drifted over the bridalveil falls vicinity.
I too like the mood of this one more than the preceding one. I thought I had already commented on it, but I guess not. I like the blueness of it, which works well with the stars. I can imagine a slight crop off the right side (where the tree sticks up). That grabs the eye, but I don't think it is intended to.
I'm curious about the shutter speed on this. For me, a particular shutter speed begins to blur the clouds but creates a kind of stutter effect that is not ideal. This image has that slight stutter in the clouds (less so than may images with a pronounced stutter in the blur), and I think stopped down with a second or two longer might make the clouds more pleasing. Would that have blurred the stars though? Probably so. Given the time of day, clouds, stars, and rapidly changing light, this is still captivating for me. I'm a fool for a blue mood!
ML