41. Mist, sunlight, and a California black oak, Yosemite
Just a reminder that if you want to vote for your favorite images of mine from 2013 the deadline is midnight tonight, Pacific time. And to all of you who have already voted – thank you very much!
— Michael Frye
Happy New Year! I hope you’ve recovered from your New Year’s Eve celebrations. 😉
Like champagne, Times Square, and Auld Lang Syne, it’s become a New Year’s tradition on this blog to pick out my best images from the past year, and once again I’m inviting you to help make these difficult choices. I’ve posted 49 of my best photographs from 2013 below, in chronological order. After you look through these please post a comment listing your ten favorites. (Click on the images to see them larger.) Once the votes are in I’ll put the top ten on this blog, and submit the finalists to Jim Goldstein’s blog project, where he’ll be showcasing the best images of the year from over 100 photographers. The voting deadline is Friday, January 3rd, at midnight Pacific time.
As always, I reserve the right to override the votes if one of my favorites gets panned. But I have yet to exercise this power — the last three years I went with the votes because, well, we’re all better at judging other people’s photographs than our own.
Thanks for your input — I appreciate your help!
—Michael Frye
Sunbeams from Tunnel View, spring, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
Happy New Year everyone! To all my readers, thank you so much for your support during the past year. Your participation makes writing this blog fun. I have lots of exciting plans for this blog, and look forward to another great year in 2014!
And don’t forget, tomorrow I’ll be posting the nominees for my best photos of 2013, and you’ll get a chance to vote for your favorites and help me pick the top ten. The image above was the top vote-getter from two years ago.
— Michael Frye
Oak tree and lunar eclipse sequence, Mariposa County, Sierra foothills, CA, USA
One of my most popular posts this year was a recent one, called Moonstruck. This article focused on how to capture moonrise and moonset photographs, with a discussion about how to predict the moon’s movements, and apps that can help with figuring out the precise position of the sun and moon.
While the Moonstruck article focused on photographing moonrises and moonsets, I’ve also written about photographing by moonlight. Tips for Photographing Lunar Rainbows delves into the specifics of moonlight photography: camera settings, shutter speeds, and how to focus in the dark. And in another post from 2012 I described the experience of photographing lunar rainbows in Yosemite, first with the crowds of photographers in Cook’s Meadow, then along the Upper Yosemite Falls Trail. And then late last year I wrote about my most memorable New Year’s Eve, and how that inspired me to make a photograph of the Three Brothers by moonlight.
Rain squall over Yosemite Valley from near Old Inspiration Point, Yosemite
Photography encourages us to go to new places, and to be out during the most beautiful times of day when others are asleep or eating dinner. And sometimes – for me anyway – getting to those places can turn into a bit of an adventure.
Last April, on Easter Sunday, Claudia and climbed over 2,000 feet in elevation through rain squalls toward Yosemite’s Old Inspiration Point. We never actually made it there, but we found another good spot nearby, and had a great adventure, as described in my post A Harebrained Idea.
In August, the Rim Fire broke out west of Yosemite. The fire spread rapidly, expanding into Yosemite, and eventually becoming the third-largest fire recorded in California.
I knew this was a big event in the history of Yosemite, so I turned my attention to photographing the fire. During my first attempts I stayed close to the road, as I described in this post. But later Claudia and I made an epic bushwhack to a dome near the Tioga Road, where I captured a panorama of the fire at dusk, shown below.
In my original post about this day I actually didn’t go into much detail about the bushwhack. I’d visited this dome once before, many years ago, to photograph a shapely Jeffrey Pine visible from the road. I remembered it as being a tough hike – only about three miles, roundtrip, but with lots of brush, and clambering over rocks. Yet this seemed like the best place to get a view of the Rim Fire. We decided to go for it, hoping the trip wasn’t as bad as I remembered.
Milky Way reflected in an alpine lake, Yosemite, captured with the Nikon D800E
I don’t often write about equipment, but in August I had a chance to test the Nikon D800E, and since it’s such a good camera for landscape photography I decided to share my thoughts about it. In terms of image quality, this camera is hard to beat unless you jump into the super-expensive realm of medium-format digital cameras.
There is, however, a new camera on the market that may prove to be a worthy competitor to the D800: the Sony A7r. This is a mirrorless camera with a 36-megapixel full-frame sensor. In fact it’s probably the exact same sensor that’s in the D800E, but in a smaller, lighter, and less-expensive package. DxO Mark rated the Sony sensor equal to the D800, and just a point below the D800E.
Unfortunately, hardly any lenses are available yet for this camera. As I write this I think only two lenses are shipping, a 35mm f/2.8, and a 55mm f/1.8, though more will be coming within the next six months or so. You can use Sony’s E-mount lenses for it’s NEX cameras with the A7r, but you’ll get serious vignetting. You can also buy adapters that will let you mount a variety of other lenses, including Zeiss, Nikon, Canon, and others. However, with most adapters you’ll lose the ability to autofocus (or if not, the performance will suffer), and possibly the automatic diaphragm as well. The D800 or D800E are still the best bets if you want a lot of megapixels with a great variety of fully-compatible lenses and accessories.
I’ve been using Lightroom since Adobe released the beta version in 2006. Over the years I’ve learned many shortcuts, and in this video I share some of my favorite tips – things I use all the time to streamline my workflow:
