We spent a week in Yosemite in August. We were with friends who were kind enough to invite us when it turned out they had extra room reservations because the original invitees had cancelled. We were very fortunate because rooms in Yosemite are typically booked up well in advance, often a year in advance, and we are too disorganized to ever book anything that far ahead of time. It was a wonderful week of hiking, swimming in creeks and rivers, and other activities. I didn't really have time on my own to take pictures, so most of my shooting was done while we were on the move, during hikes. I took hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures, deleted most of them, and posted the surviving shots in galleries organized roughly by location in the park. I also used Smugmug smart galleries to create a gallery comprising a small number of favorites drawn from all the galleries. The slideshow below is based on that gallery of favorites:
For me, Yosemite is really intimidating as a place to photograph. It is one of the most spectacular places in the world, but by the same token, it has already been photographed by the greatest landscape photographers in the world. I can't really imagine coming up with anything new to show. Accordingly, I wasn't too ambitious in my shooting this time. I used the opportunity to practice shooting alpine scenes, with mountains, cliff, lakes, forests, and creeks, and pine trees. Previously most of my limited experience with landscapes has been in the desert, on the coast, or in the redwoods, so this was a new experience for me. If I can get back there and have some free time, I would like to do more shooting around sunset and sunrise. As you can see, most of my shots were in the bright light of midday, when we were hiking.
I should disclose that some of the shots were taken my wife. We had two cameras on this trip. I recently bought a Rebel T2i that I like a lot for its light weight and video capability, and I turned the 20D over to my wife. Most of the time, I had our Tokina superwide f2.8 11-16 on the T2i and my wife was shooting with the venerable 17-55 f2.8 IS on the 20D, though sometimes we switched. The Tokina 11-16 is a really spectacular lens but I feel like I haven't really mastered shooting superwide yet. It did come in very handy with some of the spectacular vistas in the valleys, where it allowed many shots that I couldn't possibly get with the 17-55. Anyway, for the most part, if you look at the EXIF, most of the shots with a 20D were by my wife, and the T2i shots were by me.
0 comments:
Post a Comment