Yosemite - Final Morning

Our last day in California I drove back up into Yosemite Valley. It was a nice day with some lingering mist in the lower levels.

I returned to shoot some sunrise images at a location that we had originally visited on the first morning that stayed grey and cloudy.

I was much more fortunate on this visit. The location is a bend on the Merced River. El Capitan is to the west and the Three Brothers are to the east.

Being down in the shadows of the valley with the brightening sky made for a very wide contrast range. So we shot bracketed images with the plan to process as HDR images. Here are a couple of my favorite results.

Light on the Peaks - Three Brothers above the Merced

Morning Light on El Cap - Merced Reflection

The camera: Nikon D7000 with Tamron 11-16mm f/2.8. The processing: HDR processing in Photomatix, final processing in CS5

Yosemite - Brilliant Afternoon

The rain of the previous day set up today to be about as beautiful as possible for our visit. The air was washed clean and the waterfalls were flowing nicely. In the fall the waterfalls are often dried up, so the weather leading into and during our stay favored us.

Here are a couple of favorite images

Upper Yosemite Falls

Merced River - El Capitan Reflection

I have several images of the upper falls from various points of view. If you look at my waterfall image from the rainy day (previous post) you can see the flow has a different character. This image captures a great pattern of the water breaking across the rock face.

The image of El Cap and the Merced River is from the location knows as the Gates of the Valley. The entire valley was lit brilliantly, but I focused on the vertical view of El Capitan because the wisps of clouds that moved across that side of the valley.

Upper Falls was shot with the Nikkor 35-70mm zoom at f/13. Reflection was shot with the Tamron 11-16mm at f/11

Post processing is ACR and CS5. I'm using some new techniques shown to me by my instructor earlier in the week.