GenerationalFrozen Tenaya Lake Yosemite National Park, California For the first time since 1933 Tioga Rd, the northern road through Yosemite National Park, has been open this late into January. Due to the complete lack of snow the road has remained clear and the park authorities have left it open for travel. The temperatures in northern Yosemite are right around freezing during the day and much colder at night and all of the Tuolumne Meadows lakes have frozen over to the point where people are ice-skating all over them. Willie and I decided to take advantage of this once in a generation chance and drove up Sunday morning with the plan of shooting Tenaya Lake at sunset. The weather clouds looked promising and we saw perfectly partially cloudy skies all along the drive to Tenaya. We arrived early enough and spent a while scouting around the lake. At first we walked on the outside edge of the lake but after witnessing multiple people skating all over the lake we decided the frozen lake was thick enough for us to walk on. It turns out it was over a foot thick with ice! Plenty to support us. As we waited for sunset to come the unthinkable happened -- the clouds disappeared! Or should I say … they disappeared where we needed them. All around us were clouds but in the one scenic spot on Tenaya Lake, where our composition was setup, there were no clouds! Luckily a cloud rolled in just as the sun was setting but it wasn't enough to really light up. The sky got a bit pink and I was about to pull out some color in the sky but our hopes of awesome light were dashed. Oh well … it was at least neat to spend a day in Tenaya experiencing something we'll prob. never get to do again our lifetimes! Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S: 29mm, f/11, 2 sec, ISO 200, Tripod HiTech 0.6 Soft Grad ND
Laser ChiefLower Antelope Canyon Page, Arizona One of my fellow photographer friends, Jave, has a wonderful photo in Lower Antelope Canyon of light beams in front of the Granite Chief. Willie, Yan, and I had spent the night in Page, AZ and we found ourselves with half a day to kill. We arrived at Lower Antelope Canyon before they opened and were the first ones in the canyon. We didn't see anyone for over an hour. At some point one of the Navajo guides walked past and I stopped him and asked if he knew what time the light beams crossed in front of the Granite Chief. He told me that it was later in the afternoon but we had a flight to catch and couldn't wait for that to happen. Willie wanted to get a photograph of the Chief anyways. Willie took some shots and just as we were about to leave I noticed a light beam forming near the eye of the Chief! Sure enough the tiny little light beam grew and grew as the sun came up through the canyon. We stopped and fired a number of photos. I like how this looks like the Chief was Cyclop's early teacher … look at those laser beams coming out of his eye! Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S: 38mm, f/11, 2 sec, ISO 125
Moody Skies over Tunnel View Yosemite National Park, California Every year around Valentines Day the setting sun lines up such that it strikes the rock wall next to El Capitan and lights up a waterfall, known as Horsetail Falls, to give the illusion of spewing fire. We call this the “Fire Falls”, although many will remember the original “Fire Falls” when a now long-gone hotel upon Glacier Point would throw their burning coal off the one of the cliffs. With the explosion of Social Media just about every photographer in the world knows about this and flocks to Yosemite to witness and photograph the event: myself included. The winter of 2012-2013 was very dry and as a result Horsetail Falls, which is fed from snow-melt, didn’t exist. My hopes of photographing it again were dashed and instead Willie, Alan, and I spent the weekend running around from place to play trying to find something decent to photograph. One morning we woke up to cloudy skies and decided to try our luck at the popular Tunnel View. Many other photographers were there but we all were treated to a beautiful ring of fog that decided to hug El Capitan. Between the ring of fog and the cloudy skies this made for a very moody scene. I named this photo “Captains Embrace” because I loved the way the fog embraced El Capitan. Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S: 70mm, f/16, 0.6 sec, ISO 64
