Pandemic Refuge — Sam Folsom

Yosemite - October 2020

The lost year for photography! It’s hard to complain with so much suffering in the world, but photo expeditions have been an afterthought since March. I finally emerged from seven months of staying close to home to make a two-day trip to Yosemite at the end of October. I hoped the pandemic and time of year would keep the crowds down, and I organized my shoots to avoid the biggest attractions, which is usually my plan anyway. COVID didn’t seem to discourage people, though, as Yosemite was as crowded as I’ve seen it for late fall. But I largely had plenty of distance from others, including a glorious evening at Olmsted Point, all alone on a granite knoll looking down at the backside of Half Dome.

After a leisurely drive to Tioga Pass the first afternoon, I figured I would catch sunset at Olmsted Point and then turn my tripod to the east to capture the rising moon just after sundown (a day before full). The sunset part of the plan worked perfectly. Some residual forest fire smoke created hazy atmospheric conditions that filtered the setting sun’s orange and yellow colors around Half Dome in the distance. It wasn’t an overly smoky look and resulted in beautiful, slightly diffused light. I worked through a variety of compositions, using focal lengths ranging from 24mm to 400mm. While the wider views took advantage of some nice granite foregrounds and beautiful contrasts of tone and texture in the distance, the longer lengths also produced interesting results. The compressed view of 400mm helped isolate a number of forlorn trees on distant granite cliffs, which gave me a couple of images I really enjoy. I’m not sure how those atypical compositions will age to my eye, but for some reason I hardly took the ultra-wide out of my bag for most of the trip.

Conscious of the impending moonrise, I wrapped up my Olmsted sunset shots, turned to the east, and waited…and waited…and waited. I had used The Photographer’s Ephemeris to determine moonrise time and location, and while I had the direction pretty well lined up, I was way off on the timing. The moon was set to rise over a high ridge line a half mile away, but I was under the mistaken impression that TPE calculated the time to account for closer landscape features. It doesn’t. By the time the moon crested the ridge 40 minutes later, I was in complete darkness, and the moon was very bright - a bad combination for the composition I had in mind. After a couple of futile attempts to salvage a moon shot with some foreground landscape, I settled for a final west-facing composition that captured moonlight on granite with some residual sunset glow in the distance.

Fall color was a goal on this trip since I’ve been a little early for good color in recent years. Turns out I was early this year, too. I found some big leaf maples near Pohono Bridge and lower Bridalveil Creek that had turned yellow and some nice cottonwoods near Swinging Bridge, but for the most part I was a week or two early for peak color. One of the combinations that worked well was trees in good light against a shaded background, such as some of the shots from El Cap Meadow and along the river. My favorite of these was another long-lens composition of some tufts of long grass along the river against a dark-shaded background.

Visual Echo - Afternoon Light On River Grass

On my last morning, I headed to Cook’s Meadow to catch sunrise with the old black elm. The park finally blocked off the meadow to prevent trampling of the grasses, which was a welcome sight. It reminded me of the first time I shot that spot, on a workshop years ago. Our group pulled up in the dark and joined a phalanx of probably 50 photographers, all assembled shoulder-to-shoulder two hundred yards from the elm. It was a weird, cringe-worthy scene, but I was new to it, so I joined the crowd. My final recollection of that morning was just after the sun came up when the entire mob advanced toward the tree on cue, like soldiers at the Somme charging the enemy trenches. I swore I’d never be part of a scene like that again.

As it turned out, sunrise at Cook’s Meadow was a bit of a bust this time, primarily because of some high, silvery clouds. When I went to process the images, I found the sky completely mismatched with the rest of the scene. From minimal to major adjustments, everything I tried ended up looking like something from one of those AI sky replacement programs, where the sky just doesn’t connect with the land.

I finished my morning in Yosemite Valley with a visit to a reliable old favorite, Bridalveil Creek. Picking through the rocks, cascades and eddies brings me great happiness, and I always manage to lose track of time as I look for interesting compositions. Some of my all-time favorite images have come from Bridalveil Creek and falls, but this time I came up a little short. Water flow in the creek was lower than I’ve ever seen it, and there was very little fall leaf color. I used my 70-200mm lens the whole time and managed to capture a couple of interesting images, but I doubt any of them will rise to my favorites list over time.

Yosemite 2020 was a welcome escape from just about everything this year, and I came home refreshed and grateful for some time in the park with my camera.