Mammoth Lakes (CA), Shadows, Lake Crowley, High Contrast

    I am zipping along on the now dirt Owens Gorge Road, but now backtracking, since the intermittent cell phone reception and viewing Google Maps on a phone screen …

Mammoth Lakes (CA), Lake Crowley, Columns, Supermoon

    Lake Crowley Columns.  Three words that hold so much meaning and even a bit of emotion to me.  Surprising since I never knew of the columns existence until …

Mammoth Lakes (CA), Lake Crowley, Dirt Road, Yellow Brush

  There are times when the landscape in front of me is so impressive/inspiring/grand/fill-in-the-blank there is an immediate need to capture it.  If I am in a car, that means stopping …

Mammoth Lakes (CA), White Mountains, Sunset Peaks, Panorama

Hwy 395 east of the Convict Lake road

Once again, images compressed for blogs have obvious drawbacks.  95% of all the photographs on this blog were exported out of Adobe Lightroom at a maximum image width of 700 pixels.  I am not quite sure how I arrived at that number, but it seemed to fit the layout of this WordPress theme.  Yet, a panorama at 700 pixels is a bit ridiculous.  So to see this photo more clearly, it has been posted on Flickr.

This was certainly a scene you just had to be there for and this panorama hopefully provides a glimpse of what we saw.  After an afternoon in Bishop, CA visiting the Mountain Light Gallery of the late Galen Rowell, mostly unsuccessful in our attempts at leaf peeping (we were a couple of days late) in the Bishop Creek area, and shooting just adjacent to Buttermilk Road, we made our way back to Mammoth.  A potential late afternoon shoot at Convict Lake was planned, but it was obvious we were too late.  The lake was in the shadow of the Sierra Nevadas, but the White Mountains towards the east were catching the last light of the day.

It was a heck of a time trying to crop this 5-exposure panorama.  I really should keep the left 3/4 of the image, but want to keep the fading light to the right.  For now, this is how this composition will look.  Changes in the future are sure to come for the photo.

EXIF data: Nikon D7000, center-weighted metering mode, ISO100, 92mm, f/10, 0.5 sec (5 exposures)

Mammoth Lakes (CA), White Mountains, Sunset Peaks, Panorama.  Mammoth Lakes, CA. October 17, 2014. © Copyright Steven Tze – all rights reserved.

Mammoth Lakes (CA), Columnar Basalt, Lichen

Devil’s Postpile National Monument, Mammoth Lakes, CA

I have the toughest of times creating a composition of the basalt columns at Devil’s Postpile. Even when I think I have captured a photograph well, it either ends up with too many elements resulting in far too busy of a photo or it ends up like all other photos you’ve seen before.

Once again, a possible solution is to focus in on specific elements and go from there. This is how we end up with a tight crop of those amazing columnar basalt posts with just enough green lime lichen to brighten up the brown rock.

EXIF data: Nikon D7000, center-weighted metering mode, ISO100, 200mm, f/8, 1/13 sec

Mammoth Lakes (CA), Columnar Basalt, Lichen.  Mammoth Lakes, CA. October 15, 2014. © Copyright Steven Tze – all rights reserved.