This is a panorama that I took from the Columbia rock, up high 1000 feet from the Yosemite valley base. I won’t forget this hike. I started the hike without a breakfast, being too confident that I can finish this in ease! And boy, I was wrong. 20% into the hike, my blood sugar basically dropped precipitously and I could not continue without taking breaks every two minutes. I reached into my backpack for snacks that I always carry and well, there was none. I had taken them out and put them in my other backpack and totally forgot to put them back. I had my camera, tripod, panorama head, lenses, but I could not continue hiking! I could not believe it! After having done so many hikes and trips, I had made two fatal mistakes. However, I was lucky enough that a very nice couple hiking up gave me a protein bar and that was it! I had my fuel and hiked up all the way from that point. If you are reading this, thank you again! So, you can imagine, when I am at the Columbia rock, I wanted to take every opportunity to take as many photos as I could. In this photo, you can see the Half dome, the Sentinel peak and the Yosemite valley, covered in snow. I think that peak all the way in the distance, between the Sentinel and Half dome, is the Mount Clark. Please let me know if that is wrong. The Yosemite part of the website constantly changes as I upload photos from different seasons in the park. Stay tuned!
When it comes to taking photographs of the Yosemite national park, I always try to look for unique compositions. This park is probably one of the most photographed parks in the US and it is very hard to pick a shot that is different from the rest of photographs out there. It is even harder because Ansel Adams took so many beautiful black and white shots of this park that it is even harder to take shots that stand out. I have many shots of the tunnel view, but it is basically not different from the shots that are already available. So, any time that I visit Yosemite, I head to the Tunnel view, but I just soak in the views as opposed to taking the same shot over and over. There is nothing wring with taking the same shot over and over, but I prefer to be a bit more reserved with my time. Hence, in one of my visits to Yosemite, and as usual to the Tunnel view, I took these two shots that I like. They are not award-winning shots, but for me, they show a different perspective, hence I like them. The shot on the left is the famous Wawona tunnel, covered in extremely big icicles, all the while having lush green moss growing next to them in February time. The red Stop sign that is installed right at the parking looks like it is saying that we have to stop and take this scene in! I liked this composition. The shot on the right shows the famous Tunnel view, but through the icicles. The Bridalveil falls at the bottom right, complemented with the green pine on the left, and water dripping from the icicles (the water droplets are the oval pseudo-black particles you can see across the image, below the icicles. Do not confuse these with sensor dust!). El Capitan on the left, Half dome in the distance, and Cathedral peak on the right create for an image that is well balanced. Obviously, the photo was taken in harsh sun light and some hazy conditions, but as I mentioned in the About section of the website, always try to take the best image that I can at the current condition. If I want to wait for the golden hour to take photos of places that I visit or wait for perfect partly cloudy skies, I would need to live well beyond 1000 years!
Yosemite firefall! One of the most photoshopped natural sceneries that one can potentially find. During a specific time of the year in February, close to the sunset, the sun angle is such that it appears that the rocks is set on fire. If you are lucky enough that there is enough water flowing in the horsetail fall, the scenery will be phenomenal. But most of the time, there is not much water in the horsetail fall (hence the name horsetail fall, I guess) either because it is too cold and the snow has not melted or there is no snow and so the waterfall is dry. So, what you will end up seeing is that the El Capitan is set on fire. This is a phenomena that is visible only when you are looking at the rock from the side, since you should see the reflection of the sun rays. If you stand right in front of the rock, you would see just a waterfall and a rock, and no color because the reflection is going at another angle. Also, what you see with your eyes is not what you may see in photos. The photo that I have here on the right is a stacked photo of 8 images that I took from the firefall, so colors look more vibrant and saturated. The color was so saturated that I actually had to de-saturate it a bit. You can see that there is very little water flowing in the waterfall (the shiny white line up top) even though this was a record snow year. The weather was too cold for the snow to melt. The firefall is still beautiful and is painted red and orange when you see it, but it is not as bright as some photos may show or as red and orange as you may think. Our eyes cannot capture light for a long time like cameras can. We see and process instantaneously, which makes sense because if our eyes were integrating scenes, we would go crazy because we would see a continuum as opposed to a discrete event! Same concept holds true for milky way images. They are much different and more colorful than you see with your eyes, which is why milky way photos always drop jaws. As a reference, the brightness and saturation level of the firefall with naked eyes is approximately half of what you see in my image here. I can still edit this image much more than it is, but it gets misleading and unrealistic and so I keep it as is. Hope you too can see this beautiful natural phenomena. And last but not the least, please be respectful of others when trying to see this event. It is a national park, meaning it belongs to everyone! It is not anyone’s private property. I had to move my tripod multiple times because a few people thought it is not a national park!
Sunburst through the Grizzly Giant!! The Giant Sequoia Grove in Yosemite national park is somewhat of a different world. Yosemite is known for its big monoliths and iconic waterfalls, yet very close to the Yosemite valley lies this piece of land that hosts some of the biggest sequoia trees in the world. I hiked this grove in February 2023 when it was under at least 3 feet of snow and I was almost alone; there were a few hikers here and there but mostly very quite. As I passed through the many giant sequoia trees, I took multiple photos of the Grizzly Giant, the Clothespin, the Fallen Monarch, the California Tunnel Tree, the Faithful Couple, the Bachelor and Three Graces. However, once I was coming back from the hike, I saw that sun is dancing through the Grizzly Giant. I took the camera out and took a shot of this crazy moment. When I came back home and started going through the images, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the photo came out! Even though I had good pictures of the other trees I mentioned above, I decided against using them because none of them came close to being iconic for me, as the photographer, as this shot. The white snow and the green sequoias against the backdrop of a beautiful blue sky made for one of my most memorable photos of Yosemite national park. I will leave this as the only photo of the Giant Sequoia Grove on the website. If in the future I took memorable shots of the other trees, I may include them here but for now, I don’t think any shot I will take of this grove will be as good as the current shot. Hope you enjoy this as well.
Sunburst at the giant Sequoia Grove in Yosemite national park. this might look like an ordinary photo in the first glance, making you ponder what is so unique about it that made me post it here. As I started my hike through the grove in February, I saw that the snow on top of the shelter roof is melting with water droplets dropping down all the way to the ground. But what I also saw was that direct sunlight was causing the water to evaporate, creating a stream of water vapor that was rising up into the sky. You can see the water vapor just between the sunburst and the the roof. But “it is a cloud”, you may say, which is a legitimate argument given that there is a faint piece of could on the right of the tree. The answer lies in the perspective and the intensity of the sun rays in the photo. If this were a cloud and not water vapor, the sun rays would go through the white patch that we see on the left as opposed to being somehow obscured by them, as the photo shows. Another educational piece about the photo is that you may see some rainbow effects caused at unexpected places (on top of the tree). In optics, these are referred to as flare caused by diffraction. Some people like them, some dislike them. I don’t mind having them in the photo. They basically say that even the most advanced cameras and lenses cannot solve all the optical issues that we see around us.
A ridiculous panorama that I took from the Yosemite valley at the early morning of August 13th, 2023. This night was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower and I had planned every shot almost to the perfection and physically and mentally prepared myself for backpacking in the Yosemite Wilderness with a 50-lb backpack. I even had the exact point from which I wanted to take my shot and the exact hour that I wanted to start taking photos such that I can have the Milky Way core in the photo along with a few meteors over the Glacier point and then swap lenses and take wide angle shots of the meteor shower over the Yosemite valley. Then, the famous saying by Mike Tyson resurrected: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” And I was punched hard! I was close to the Lehamite Creek that dark clouds crept in very fast and crazy thunders and lightnings started to send my plans down to the abyss. Then hailstorm started and after three minutes, rain started to come down crazy and it won’t stop. The weather forecast had said that it would be raining for an hour and then it will get clear, but alas! A forecast is forecast and it never materialized. Storm started from 7:30 pm and caused me and my buddy to go and set our tent below a tree. I slept at 7:45 pm (I don’t think I have ever slept that early in the past 20 years) and then woke up at 11:45 pm. Rain had stopped but everything was wet (glad I had a rain cover for the tent). I woke my buddy up and we headed up to the top of the North dome at 12 am!! Everywhere was pretty wet and the weather pretty damp and the sky cloudy like it is Seattle! Regardless, we hiked up to the top of the dome and started gazing at the sky hopelessly. The cloud cover was pretty thick and almost no opening of any kind. This is exactly the reason that I am one of those landscape photographers that, because of my love for landscape astrophotography, I do not like cloudy skies for landscape photography!! There were instances that the clouds would give up a bit and in those moments we were able to see some meteors. The Perseid meteor shower is one of the strongest meteor showers of the year with up to 80 meteors per hour. Despite all the clouds, we were able to see around 40 meteors across the sky in about 3 hours which was ridiculously good. When all my plans crashed down, I decided to take a panorama of the Yosemite valley and I was quite surprised it came out this good. It is probably my all-time favorite shot of the Yosemite national park given all the circumstances! You can see the Clouds Rest at the left, the Half Dome, Mount Clark (I think), the Glacier point, Sentinel dome, and the western entrance of the Yosemite national park. The weird color transition From the left of the image to the right is a direct consequence of light pollution. On the left, sky is dark with a blue tint while on the right, it is very bright with a yellow tint. Note that clouds reflect most of the light from the earth, so light pollution gets even more pronounced! However, this underscores the heartbreaking fact that even in Yosemite national park, we are not having a dark sky! Remember that if you see a town from the sky, it means that light From the street lights and houses makes its way to the sky! This is not great, because this light is basically wasted energy! We want to light up the streets not the sky! I took separate shots for the foreground and the sky for this panorama but I did not have time to do processing of both shots and then to blend them together, so I just used the shot that I took for the foreground and it actually is pretty sharp even for the sky. I used a 50-mm lens, F1.6, at 30 seconds of exposure at ISO 1000. One educational note: if you look at the puddles formed after the rain, you can easily see the sky color transition in there too which actually is one of the reasons I did not do the foreground and sky blending because the sky color would have looked different in the reflection (I sometimes see this color discrepancy in some other photographs).
Yosemite is not known for having the best fall foliage colors as most of its trees are ever-green ponderosa trees. However, if you walk around the park, you can find some beautiful colors of deciduous trees around the park. They are very prominent around the upper pine campground and happy isle bridge at curry village and the Bridalveil fall near El Capitan campground. Depending on the time of year, you may see some dogwood trees here and there the leaves of which have changed colors. The photo above shows half dome in between the green and yellow leaves of trees in late October. The photo below is taken from the trees next to the Bridalveil fall trail as sun becomes just tangent to the cliffs, penetrating through the layer of smoke covering the valley. The smoke was part of a self-contained operation by the park officials to prevent potential fires in future. While I was mad about it ruining photos, I tried to work around it and the photo came out absolutely gorgeous. This is probably the most iconic place someone can take a photo of Yosemite fall foliage. The waterfall had very little water running through it, so I had to take many shots and stack them to make the waterfall photo-worthy. I try to say all the details of the photo to not make the viewer make presumptions about how good the water flow is at late October or how beautiful fall foliage can be in Yosemite. This way, potentially we avoid disappointments once we end up in Yosemite in October. Still beautiful but not a typical Midwest or East Coast fall foliage for sure.
Yosemite’s famous Tunnel view in two photographs that are around half an hour apart. The photo on the left was taken as the sun was setting and the photo on the right was taken as the moon was rising from above the half Dome. Photos are taken with a 50-mm lens and the moon is true to size. The tunnel view was taken as a stack of 8 photos to make the noise reduced and increase the details in shadows as well as making the waterfall look more pronounced for an October photo. One hundred moon shots were taken with the same lens and then stacked in postprocessing and later overlaid on the photo for better resolution of the final moon image. I could have quadrupled the moon size to make it look gigantic but that again is a false representation of what my eyes saw when I was there. I love tunnel view for sunset and moonrise shots and never liked it for sunrise photos even though it is very popular for sunrise. Most of the time sun does not rise from the desired location such as from half dome or cloud rest and so the photo does not end up being special during sunrise. I actually prefer shooting sunrise photos not directly into the sun but in fact, perpendicular to the direction of sunrise. This way I can capture sun rays and get much more detail in my image as opposed to capturing a washed-out image or an image that needs many exposure stackings. The photo below shows sunrise at half dome as seen from glacier point, in October. I actually like this photo a lot as it shows the color change of ponderosa trees as sun hits them while other trees look green. Of course, that is my personal opinion and others might disagree.
