Sky shots

Topics covering photography and videography of the flora, fauna and landscape of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Show off your talent. Post your photos and videos here!
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krudler
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Post by krudler »

I got this shot of a weird cloud formation in DomeLand Wilderness back in November.

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Ratboy
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Post by Ratboy »

This was taken on July 5th at Trail Camp along the Main Mt. Whitney Trail...I like that the cloud looks like demon wings and the pinnacles look like they are on fire.

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Snow Nymph
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Post by Snow Nymph »

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free . . . . Jim Morrison


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mountainLight
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Post by mountainLight »

Wow snowy, if i had seen that the last thing i would do would be to take a picture. I can't even imagine a funel that high up. Thanks for sharing.
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Post by Ratboy »

Too cool.
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Post by SSSdave »

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This is something I shot with my view camera last Friday afternoon at dusk. Actually it is a crop from the 4x5 Provia transparency. Enough to make maybe a 11x14 inch full resolution print. The full image is one of a lake reflection in Silver Lake up on SR88. I may post that if someone is curious. Twas one of the hottest days during that heat wave and monsoonal t-storms built up most afternoons. This one had lots of lightning an hour or so earlier. Such days often present exceptional late light conditions on clouds if one is west of the clouds because there is usually clear blue skies to the west so the late warm light is unblocked. Also the storms tend to create areas of clearer air without haze. ...David
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Buck Forester
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Post by Buck Forester »

Very nice sky shots in this thread!

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Here's a "reach out and touch the clouds" shot taken from the trail nearing Mt. Whitney, around 14,000' or so. The clouds were whizzin' right over our heads, what a feeling!




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One of those fiery sunsets that we've all seen in the High Sierra (but they don't happen often enough!), this one over a lake in Pioneer Basin, John Muir Wilderness. The colors happened so fast (I was actually taking pictures looking the other direction!) and they disappeared so fast that I didn't really have time to get the composition I really wanted, but still, it captures the beauty of the sunset.



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Another Pioneer Basin sky shot.




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Soft pastel sky from the... ... overlook, oops as usual, I'm not saying "where" in regards to the location. Some places are just plain secrets. :unibrow:




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This was a beautiful sky one evening while I was camped at Muriel Lake just over Piute Pass.




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Some cool lenticulars over Mono Lake (couldn't get the tufa tower to move out of my pic, ha!)



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I really liked this sky as I made the final ridge to Forester Pass from the north. This is looking back north from wence I came. As you can see, I use my fishing pole as a lightning rod. It worked... it took several direct hit lightning bolts that otherwise would've fried me. I didn't even lose a step.



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As most of us have who've been to Mono Lake have seen, the place is infested with incredible skies at sunset. We could probably fill this thread with just cool Mono Lake sky shots. In this shot, God was doing some last minute sweeping before He ended the day.



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This was kind of a cool sky, taken from a bluff in the Sinkyone Wilderness, Lost Coast, late afternoon.



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This is almost a "typical" High Sierra afternoon sky... deep blue with happy, puffy white cumulous clouds.


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Like I said, Mono Lake rarely fails! This time a hawk or osprey flew into my pic unexpected (10-second timer, I had nothing to do with it, ha!), which really added to an already cool sky.



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Sorry, I was only gonna post a couple shots. I like the sky in this shot because of the weird cloud shade against the sun beams. This is Evolution Lake, looking towards the outlet.



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"Sun" flower, looking up at the sky from an ant's perspective, a black ant, which is my favorite fly to use for Sierra trout. Everything always comes back to fishing.



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Hmmm... another Mono Lake sky shot. Well I'll be. This is Starship Enterprise coming in for a landing, well after the sun had set. It was cool, I had dinner with Cap'n Kirk.

As if creation isn't beautiful enough, God is always adding to it with amazing skies. Great thread idea!
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Buck Forester
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Post by Buck Forester »

Okay, two more.


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Here's one of the very first pics I ever took with my Canon Elan 7 and Fuji Velvia 50 film. It was on the first roll. I didn't scan it at a very high resolution (sorry for the low-rez!) but man, it was a sweet sunset to witness! This is just outside of Bishop a couple miles. If you lived there, whew!, just think of the images you could get as these types of sunsets are not uncommon in the area.


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Duh, another Mono Lake sky! This was from my winter kayaking trip. It was amazing. I took 32 beeellion rolls of film, it was just incredibly gorgeous that stormy weekend! This was the same weekend as the image that ended up in NGA http://www.flickr.com/photos/buckforest ... 113622417/ and actually it was taken the same evening. I wanted to do it again last winter but couldn't pull it off, hopefully I will be able to this winter. It was an amazing experience. Okay, I'm done. Suuuure I am. You never know.
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Post by ifernau »

WOW, Buck, these are amazing.
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Post by SSSdave »

Buck, Exceptional shot of lenticulars and tufa. I recall seeing some of these fine images on another site in 2003 after you did your JMT trip. A summer with a big July monsoon event. Over my younger years when I shot 35mm, I'd often try and get early and late cloud light reflecting on Mono Lake. The best results were dawn images from South Tufa or Old Marina in the summer and County Park in the fall. These days with the risen water levels have submerged a lot of the former tufas, so those locations that work with tufas are considerably fewer. I've also got some old impressive dusk shots from Muriel Lake area too. Not only that lake but there are a few well positioned small ponds in that area that work well towards Piute Pass and Mount Humphreys. In fact generally Humphreys Basin is one of the best backcountry areas of the High Sierra to work on getting some cloud reflectiions in lakes and ponds because there are few ridges, hills, or trees around many of the many lakes and ponds so one can get a lot of the sky into camera frames. Additionally because of the low gradient of much of the landscape without confining canyons, many of the waters have little early morning sumping flows of night air that would otherwise tend to make breezy waves.

In August 1982 I solo backpacked about Humphreys Basin for a week during a brutal monsoon period while only having a leaky bivy sack for shelter. However that was an excellent week for clouds just like it was for you Buck in 2003. I used to have a few tens of thousands of old 35mm Kodachromes from my SLR days that were stored in those metal slide boxes. That took up a lot of space. Last fall reorganized all that into far fewer boxes tossing out maybe 60%. Huge all day week long effort that had to be done. A decade ago I had Kodak Pro CDs created for several hundred of my best Kodachromes so digital renditions of those images are relatively easy for me to get at. The few 35mm images on my web site that were drum scanned for small fine art usage are there mostly just to show I'd taken some impressive images over a long number of years though I don't really expect people will actually be purchasing many of those small format prints as in person those prints look pretty unimpressive beside the larger format work. I could put up a lot more of the small format images that look fine on a web site, but I don't want to really alert the more savvy photographers to some of the great locations the Sierra still offers those who make an effort to explore it. At least not before I get to take my own whack at it with my view camera haha. Below are a few cloud shots all from that same 1982 Humphreys Basin trip I made which were also among those Pro Photo CD scanned.

This first image is looking east towards Piute Pass and Mount Emerson while a huge dark thunderstorm fades east across the Sierra Crest. On the other side of this pond a group of backpackers lounged about their lean too. The unique thing is the cloud made the sky so dark that there was no reflection in the foreground area of the pond so one can instead see the interesting pattern of granite rock on the bottom.

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This second image is also looking east towards Piute Pass on the same day a bit later when the clouds were thinning though before sunset.
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The third image I won't say much about except that it is a nice spot even without these great clouds and I will have fun there with my 4x5.
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All the monsoonal weather really can create some interesting dusk colors as it clears the air for miles in a way that tends to emphasize the more red spectrum. Of all my years out in the Sierra, the below telephoto captured the most striking red dusk I've ever seen. Note the disintegrating thunderhead anvil shape of the cloud. ...David
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