Forest Detail, Yosemite National Park, California
Phase One XF, IQ3 100MP Trichromatic, 240mm Schneider Kreuznach, f4 @ 1/1600 second, ISO 400
Sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for. Over the decades of visiting Yosemite National Park in Western USA, I’ve always wondered what it would be like in fresh snow. When you’re in the park itself, the gift shops are full of postcards (well, they used to be full of postcards, but I guess we don’t send them that much anymore), many with photos of Yosemite after a heavy fall of beautiful, white snow.
The lure of just happening to be in the right place at the right time is one of the reasons Tony Hewitt and I took photo tours around SW USA in January, February and March. While you can’t predict the weather, you can give yourself a fighting chance by travelling at appropriate times of the year and I have to say, winter in the South West USA is great. Not only is there a chance of fresh snow, the crowds are considerably fewer and I confess to having little interest in joining the millions who visit Yosemite in the warmer months (Yosemite itself says it draws four million visitors annually)!
As it turns out, we’ve had fresh snow at Yosemite a couple of times now. In 2019, the whole of the South West got more than we bargained for. Yosemite received its snowfall at the beginning of a huge storm system that saw our itinerary changing dramatically. Some of the locations planned after Yosemite we simply couldn’t access and it was a matter of driving around the storm and adapting. Still, as photographers this is not a bad problem to have and the changing weather systems provided us with lots of great opportunities.
The valley floor in Yosemite isn’t that high and there are lots of snowploughs around, so we could drive the Sprinter van around as the snow came down. And there was lots of snow as you can see.
In the middle of a snow storm, visibility is limited. Naturally! So the big vistas and towering mountain tops simply weren’t on show, but the smaller, intimate landscapes abounded in droves!
What attracted me to this location were the soft tones and shadows. Snow reflects light everywhere, softening and smoothing out shapes and forms in more ways than one. And I also loved the busyness of the forest scene with the strong verticals of the tree trunks being emphasised by the network of horizontal branches. I find for photos like this that what you leave out of the frame is just as important as what you keep in, so I moved in a little closer to fill the frame with the dense detail.