Arctic Yosemite

Here's another recent photo of Yosemite, which was taken just a little over a week ago. This photo can fool some people. Looking at it, it looks very blustery, cold, and a scene from the arctic.

This photo was actually taken during midday. When the sun comes out and hits the snow, it starts to melt and vaporize the snow, which creates these low-lying fog layers, that you actually see in this photo. So, another reason to chase the sunlight.

Now, I took many shots of these scene. I had a area of young pine trees (more off to the left, just out of frame) and I chose different number of them to included in the scene. I eventually chose the scene with the fewest pine trees. I did this, because I really liked the fog and the atmospheric feel that it gave to the shot.

I tried composing Cathedral Rock (the large pointed rock) in different spots in the photo, as well. I ended up liking it on the left side, because I liked the space off to the right side, which helped include more of the snowy foreground and fog layer, more clouds in the sky in the upper right-hand corner, and the trees in the very background, on the very right side. I always like to trail trees at varying distances from the foreground into the background, especially in a foggy scene. It is a great way to gauge how thick or thin the fog is.

I processed this in both color and black-and-white. I kind of liked the black-and-white just a bit more. When I convert into black-and-white, I love to include grain. Most of the time, if a digital photo is converted to black-and-white, it looks too clean. That is why I add some film-like grain into the photo.