High Sierra Topix

WOW, Buck, these are amazing.

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.



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.


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.


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

Awesome Guys!!!




No PhotoShop monkey business this cloud was really shaped like a heart.


that's in the sky

Nice photographs, everyone! Here's one I took in Kings Canyon last fall, shortly before getting snowed on.

Wonderful photos! Here's a shot of monsoonal leftovers taken last August.
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Fantastic shots everyone! My jaw hurts from dropping so many times. I don't have too many sky shots to contribute (esp. not close to the quality of those posted before), but here are a few I dug up quickly, both from glacier point: