Morning light, Gates of the Valley, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
After the big rainstorm last week I drove up to Yosemite Valley early Wednesday morning. I knew there wouldn’t be fresh snow, but I hoped for some mist and interesting light. It turned out that mist was scarce, probably due to below-freezing overnight temperatures, but there was a little bit here and there.
I stopped at a couple of places, and found myself at Gates of the Valley (aka Valley View) as the sun started to hit El Capitan and light up the clouds above. After making a few photographs with fast shutter speeds, I decided it would be more interesting to smooth out the water with a very slow shutter speed. My seven-stop neutral-density filter did the trick, allowing me to lengthen the exposure to 15 seconds. Thinking about the nighttime panorama I made from this spot recently, I decided to try that again, using my 24mm Rokinon lens in a vertical orientation, and making four exposures to capture the broad sweep of this scene. After a few minutes the light actually got more interesting, with a thin beam of sunlight raking across the face of El Cap.
One of the issues I had to deal with was the small log in the water near the middle of the photograph. There was no way to avoid this log, and I definitely did not want it to merge with the edge of a reflection, so I deliberately placed the camera so that the log would appear between the reflections of El Cap and Cathedral Rocks. As it turned out, the diagonal line created by the log actually echoes lines created by wakes on the right side of the frame, making a little repeating pattern – a nice bit of luck that helped the log add interest to the composition, rather than becoming a distraction.
I used Lightroom’s Panorama Merge again for stitching the sequence together. The long exposures precluded bracketing because the clouds and light would change too much by the time I finished capturing the sequence, making blending and stitching difficult, if not impossible. So I exposed for the highlights, then after stitching together the panorama I lightened the midtones and shadows in Lightroom. (The high dynamic range and low shadow noise of the Sony A7rII made it possible to lighten the shadows quite a bit without creating any appreciable noise. The settings for each frame with the seven-stop ND filter were 15 seconds at f/16, 50 ISO. I always use manual-exposure mode, but it’s especially important to use manual exposures for panoramas, because it’s difficult to stitch the images together if the brightness varies between frames.)
From the beginning I visualized this photograph in black and white. The sun was pretty high by this time, so there wasn’t much color, and I like the silvery look created by the combination of flowing water, a slow shutter speed, and a black-and-white treatment. By my very high standards this wasn’t the most exciting morning in Yosemite Valley, but there were ten minutes of beautiful light, and the resulting photograph has a certain hard-to-define mood that has grown on me.
— Michael Frye
Related Posts: Gates of the Valley by Moonlight; Knowing Where to Stand; When Separation is a Good Thing
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Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He is the author or principal photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, Yosemite Meditations for Women, Yosemite Meditations for Adventurers, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters. He has also written three eBooks: Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom, Exposure for Outdoor Photography, and Landscapes in Lightroom: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide. Michael has written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and his images have been published in over thirty countries around the world. Michael has lived either in or near Yosemite National Park since 1983, currently residing just outside the park in Mariposa, California.
Very nice Michael. Especially so in B&W.
Do you think we may get enough rain/snow so that the Merced will fill high enough to cover a lot of the debris that has been visible the last few years? I’ve been somewhat disappointed at the photo ops involving the Merced (because of all the visible debris) the last couple of years.
Thanks John! There’s always debris in the river – that’s a normal thing with a wild river, and there’s plenty of debris in the Merced even in wet years. In fact in wet years, even though higher flows may cover some of the debris, the increased flow will also carry more branches and logs and deposit them in slower-moving stretches. In any year the water level fluctuates greatly, increasing in the spring, and decreasing in the summer and fall. Even during the last four years of drought, the water level has gone up in the spring high enough to cover most of the debris. The only difference is that the period of high water has been shorter, and the lowest levels lower than usual.
As this photo shows, the water level is fairly high right now for December. Your guess is as good as mine about whether the precipitation will continue, and the flow will be at above-normal or below-normal levels. Personally, I haven’t found all that debris the last few years to be a problem photographically. It’s no worse than normal, and the low water levels during summer and fall have allowed access to spots you can’t normally get to without waders.
Thanks Michael. I guess I need to get there more often. 🙂
Beautiful photograph. Especially well rendered in b+w.
Thank you Deborah!
That “…certain hard-to-define mood…” didn’t take long to grow on ME. I loved it right off the bat. A beautiful scene, beautifully seen and processed. BIG wall space now required!
Thanks very much Chuck!
Michael, breathtaking image and in B&W it creates a mood that color would not. With your A7rll how large was this pano’s file size?
And a Happy New Year to you and Claudia!
Jim
Thanks Jim! About 200 MB. I used uncompressed Raw, which made the original Raw files about 80 MB, but I don’t know if using compressed or uncompressed Raw in the camera affects the size of the resulting DNG panorama.
When creating a pano of multiple images involving clouds and water, how do you ensure that the stitch is seamless?
Thanks.
Best Regards,
Duy Le
Clouds are not usually a problem if you capture the sequence relatively quickly, and the clouds aren’t moving too fast. Since clouds are usually rather fuzzy, if something doesn’t line up perfectly it’s usually not noticeable. Water can be a problem if you’re using a fast shutter speed, which will freeze ripples, so the ripples from one frame won’t match the neighboring frame, and there will be an obvious line or seam where the two images intersect. Sometimes that seam can be fixed by retouching, but the easiest way to avoid that problem is to use a slow shutter speed and smooth out the water, as I did here. Smooth water = no ripples = no stitching problems. 🙂
always good to hear from a PRO landscape photographer