Yosemite Trip (Jan 2010)

As most of you know, every year I religiously pay a visit to Yosemite in winter. My trip this year was a bit early and accompanied. It was a family trip. After lots of fun in skiing and tubing  [well… for me, mostly watching it and pulling tubes on slopes  :(], I bought my time for few clicks at sunset.

To my surprise,  Horsetail falls is not flowing yet. If I can not make another trip in next three weeks, I will miss this falls consecutively third year as well. First year I could not trace the location. This thin falls is almost invisible for wondering eyes on 3000 ft granite monolith, El Capitan. One evening that I spent in the valley last year was not favorable in terms of weather. It should be a clear day to see the magic that happens at sunset every day during last two weeks of February. Sun illuminates this falls and it looks like fire flowing down the cliff. Original composition was done by Galen Rowel. Here is complete article about this  falls  by  Michael Frye (http://www.michaelfrye.com/articles/horsetail.html).
Hopefully, enough snow melts in time for this year and I can make one of these week ends again to Yosemite valley.

Horsetail falls being out of scope, I left with fifteen minutes to decide on location. I was close to valley view, so I decided to shoot El Capitan. I did this two years ago, but last those high resolution images in a computer crash. Well, good that I took another shot at it, this was better.

Light on El Capitan is not as red as what I saw earlier (since it was late February), but now I got good foreground and light covered El Capitan more. I stayed up late after sunset and turned around and saw the opposite cliffs are illuminated (partially by moon, I think). So I took this image from the logs that I have been sitting on.

Past, Future and Present

Next morning sunrise was rained out, so got good full night sleep.  Next day, same exercise with kids… pull the tube all the way up slope and back, fetch them and go again. But I couldn’t buy my free time that day. Kids wanted to build a snowman and do more sledding on wild slopes (non-groomed). After struggling with sled for sometime, I tried to push some snow up and call it a snowman and thought to steel some time for sunset. While I was hurrying, my consciousness gave me a bonk.
I hardly had anytime to search a location or even to drive to any known locations before sunset. So instead of doing two mediocre things and sure to fail, I decided to do one thing atleast right and turn the situation to my favour. So kept our snow-modeling skills a test and used it as subject for my sunset picture. So here we go with Mrs.Frosty….

Mrs. Frosty

Next morning , got up at 5AM and hurried to tunnel view. Slipped on frozen deck out side our cabin and did a half somersault and landed on my back. Good thing about cold weather is that you don’t feel pain until you are warm again 🙂 But sunrise was good. This was my third/fourth attempt at this place. Even though I reached at 5:30AM, colors peaked just few minutes before sunrise (7AM) Its pretty classic image from Yosemite. Composition inspired by Ansel Adams, few people before him and million others following him till yesterday.

Yosemite Classic

I did about 45 minutes walk-up in merced river bank after sunrise to shoot three-brothers, but with lot of debris around…did not get nice location.  So just these four images from this trip.

Happy Clicking…
Swamy