Dave Wyman's Gallery
Sierra Nevada East Side - 2010
Once again, a plucky group of photographers made their way to the very heart of the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, to photograph fall colors, Mono Lake, and the ghost town of Bodie. We will do it again next year. Here are some of my photographs.
Aspens and Starburst
The way to achieve a starburst, without a special filter, is to set the camera to f/16 or f/22, and then meter off the trees without the sun in the viewfinder. That way the trees are exposed correctly, and the very small f/stop will bend the light around the blades of the shutter to create the starburst effect. Sometimes I like to look up at the trees, rather than straight on; it can sometimes make for a compelling image.
A Leaf in Lee Vining Creek
This is almost an abstract image. I slowed the shutter down to 1/6th of a second, which gave enough time for the water in the creek to blur a little.
Culvert Beneath the Road
For the past few years, I've found pleasure in photographing this culvert that runs under the road in Lee Vining Canyon. Like any subject, there is no one correct way to picture this metal tube. The colors bouncing around the inside of the culvert change, the flow of the water is always different, the light at the end of the tunnel varies. I suppose that's why I find pleasure with it.
Golden Reflections
The reflections in pools of water and the creeks flowing out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains were as colorful as I've ever seen them, in what was, in my memory, the best year for autumn color I've ever seen. One of the enjoyable aspects of photographing reflections of fall in bodies of water is the knowledge that each image is unique. The trick to finding good reflections is, of course, to have some experience to know they are there. And the careful photographer will walk around a reflection, to see both what might be imagined, as well as all that can be revealed.
Aspens at Their Peak
The low angle, the lines of the trees, the leaves and the road all lead the viewer into the photograph.
Gold on Gold
By using a 300mm lens, I managed to completely throw the background out of focus; it was a small aspen tree light with the light of the sun shining through its leaves. The long lens also let me narrow the background, cutting out everything in the scene as my eye saw it except for the colorful tree. When I use a long lens, it isn't always to bring in something far away, it's to help control the way the background looks compared to what I have in the foreground; it's to help create some sort of tension between the foreground and the background.
Seagull at the Bridgeport Reservoir
Another look at the Bridgeport Reservoir, and another look directly into the sun, as per my earlier Mono Lake photograph. The seagull was a fortuitous addition to the scene. The landscape looked completely different to my eye. I could see detail and color not visible here. Yet it's that abstraction of information that I think makes this photograph work. Experience, in fact, taught me that I could make an image more abstract than realistic, and experience taught me it would please my aesthetic sensibility.
Dawn Over Mono Lake
Unlike the earlier image in this series, I pointed my camera into the sun. I'm not sure this looks that much like the original scene; it's probably more contrasty, and I added some warmer color.
Bridgeport Reservoir
This is the same reservoir pictured in the background of the previous photo. My approach this time was to explore the design of the landscape itself, rather than use it as a counterpoint to foreground details.
Backlit at the Bridgeport Reservoir
I used a reasonably long lens to zoom in on the vegetation in the foreground. The long lens also let me narrow the background, so that the top of the plant fit into the bright haze of water in the Bridgeport Reservoir (the same reservoir pictured in the the next photograph).
Early Light Over Mono Lake
Our group had perfect timing, arriving at the viewpoint over Mono Lake as dawn light was breaking. Although I made many photographs directly into the light, I also tried photographing off to one side of the sun, or other. While there is a lot of contrast, I think the layering of lights and darks and colors is effective, if only because it is so evocative of the moment.
Horse Behind the Fence
The horses behind the fence weren't playing along. Rather than posing for us, they were ignoring us, feeding with heads on the ground. I fell back on a technique I came up with a few years ago: I told myself to photograph my subject by not photographing it. In this case, I decided to focus on the nearby fence, use a large f/stop, and allow the horse to go out of focus. I think it worked. The emphasis is on the fence, and yet we recognize the bright object in the background for what it is, anyway.
Along Highway 182
Our first stop was along a colorful stretch of Highway 182, which leads from the little town of Bridgeport, California into Nevada. This was the place to warm up, even as threatening skies and a few drops of rain threatened to cool off the proceeding.
I like the white and yellow lines on the road that lead into the picture. A photograph of a road, after all, can be a metaphor for our lives, for the journeys well all make, from one end of life to the other.
Even though the
... View More overcast sky was dark, compared to the sky on a sunny day, it was still much, much brighter than the landscape. Rather than combine the sky above with the land below, by making multiple images to work with in the computer, I simply cut the sky out of the photograph by tilting my camera down.
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