Wednesday, May 4, 2005

The weatherman was wrong. Not that I'm complaining. Although it didn't rain, the day was overcast for the most part...the sun glowed through the cloud cover a few times, but even then the light was soft, albeit warmer than when the sun's shimmering sphere was hidden completely.

I headed up Route 120 with two things in mind: gasoline and waterfalls. The gas went as planned, but the waterfalls would wait. On the way up, I noticed a spot where the road shoulder was completely coated with blue and purple flowers accented with a few red/pink/yellow blossoms for contrast. On the way back down, I stopped and spent a half hour tippy-toeing through the poseys (trying not to crush any of them) and composing miniature landscapes and still lifes with the flowers and the logs and rocks that accompanied them.

When I finally tired of flower photos, I headed down to Yosemite Village to make a call to an L.A. agency that had contacted me about doing a photo shoot and to meet photographer friend Mike Neal for lunch. I'd met Mike during my February visit to Yosemite, and it seems we have a lot in common. We dined on cheeseburgers and chatted for a couple hours before he headed for home and I wandered off in search of...I had no clue.

On overcast/rainy days I look for images that don't require the contrast and emphasis of sunlight. That means flowing water where I can use a slow shutter speed to make the water look like soft, flowing mist, and for miniatures where what's above the horizon just doesn't matter. (Overcast days are usually useless for landscape photography. The land is flat-lit and boring, and the sky generally registers as white instead of blue. Yuk.)

I meandered through the woods on the Yosemite Valley floor, looking down and thinking small. I found a number of interesting compositions, including the log with tiny white flowers at the right.

Then I decided to go back and pick up the waterfalls I'd overlooked in favor of flowers this morning. On the way out of the valley, I saw that the soft sunlight had illuminated a scene I'd noticed before (the trees against the cliff at the right), so I stopped and recorded a few versions of it.

The waterfall picture is from Cascade Creek, the same one I shot from the other side of the valley on May 2.

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This time I climbed down the cliff to a vantage point that induced extreme vertigo (that's right...I'll never be a rock climber; I'm afraid of heights) and thus became the last shot of the day. Crouching on a rock that sloped toward a thousand-foot drop drained me emotionally, so after I climbed back up, I called it a day and headed back to Charlie Cramer's cabin to begin writing this journal.