I was fortunate to make a return trip to Joshua Tree National Park with Garry McCarthy to try to improve on the night time arch photos we made there earlier. I think I succeeded, producing three keepers including one large panoramic image of the Milky Way spanning the night sky over Arch Rock. Printed, without interpolation, this image would be 9′ long! I also managed to join Mike Johnson on the ocean for a few days, where we had a couple photography opportunities that yielded images of bottlenose dolphin above water and strange planktonic colonial gelatinous tunicates (salps) below the waves. My daughter Sarah and I took a little road trip to Yosemite National Park for our annual hike up the Mist Trail, giving me a chance to wade into the Merced River in search of new reflection shots of the spring-flood waterfalls pouring into the valley from the granite heights above. My favorite of the bunch is the panorama below, of Yosemite Falls reflected in a sidewater of the Merced that has flooded a nearby meadow. We then continued up to the recently opened Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Pass and on through a clearing storm in Mammoth and Bishop where we were treated to some beautiful but fleeting storm-laden sunrise light above Convict Lake.
Click the photo below to see the latest edition of my gallery of “New Work July 2011“. Thanks for looking!
Yosemite Falls reflected in flooded meadow. The Merced River floods its banks in spring, forming beautiful reflections of Yosemite Falls.
Image ID: 26887
Location: Yosemite National Park, California, USA
Here’s a tip for photographing Yosemite Falls in spring and early summer: wait for the sun to rise high enough that it lights the falls directly. This occurs about 9:30 to 10am. Earlier than that and the falls will actually be in shadow. Once the light hits the falls directly, they visually “pop” off the rest of the shadowed wall making for a more striking photograph than that taken just 30 minutes earlier. When Yosemite Falls is fully lit, it will also appear with greater contrast when reflected in the Merced River. The easiest, and one of the best, reflection images to make of Yosemite Falls is from the middle of the Swinging Bridge at the west end of the Leidig Meadows area. Swinging Bridge is sometimes closed when the Merced River is too high, but when that occurs there are plenty of other reflection pools you can use.
