<< Back to Moonrise Over the Valley

Every July, when school is out and before the summer workshops I teach in August, I take one week in Yosemite with the big camera. This year my wife, Jean, came along, as she has most years since 1965, with a stack of library books and the patience of a saint. What follows is my log, copied out of the little notebook I keep in the camera bag. The exposure notes are for the photographers. Everyone else may skip them without hurting my feelings.

Twenty-four sheets for seven days. I would rather run out of film than load holders in a changing tent by flashlight at my age, and a short supply makes a man choose carefully. That was always the point.

Left Fresno after an early lunch, with the thermometer over a hundred, as it often is in July. Up 41 through Oakhurst and Wawona, and through the tunnel at a quarter to four. Harsh, flat afternoon light, the whole Valley washed out in haze, so we drove on and set up camp at Upper Pines, a site I booked in March. Back to the Tunnel View at seven. At about eight the sun came low across El Capitan and turned the face gold while the Valley floor went into shadow.

Tunnel View, 210mm. Shadowed trees below El Cap placed on III. Sunlit face falls on VIII. Normal development (N). 2 sheets. Sheets used: 2 of 24.

Up at five. Cook's Meadow at first light, with the lone elm and Yosemite Falls behind it. I had hoped for ground mist and did not expect it in July, and did not get it. The upper fall is still running, a ribbon of what it is in May. The meadow was silent but for a coyote crossing at the far end, who looked at me with no interest at all.

In the evening, Sentinel Bridge, where Half Dome stands at the end of the river and lies in it upside down. I watched the face go from white to gold to rose. It is the most photographed view in the park, and I do not care. Twelve other people had tripods on the bridge, and we were all very polite about it.

Cook's Meadow, 150mm. Shade under the elm on III, falls on VIII. N. 2 sheets.
Sentinel Bridge, 150mm. Riverbank shadows on III. First sheet: Half Dome in full sun falls on IX, mark it N-1. Second sheet ten minutes later, rose light, falls on VIII, N. 2 sheets. Sheets used: 6 of 24.

Glacier Point. We drove up the Glacier Point Road after lunch, and Jean read in the shade while I walked the rim and waited for the light. From the railing, Half Dome stands straight across the gorge, with Vernal and Nevada Falls stepping down the canyon to the right and Clouds Rest behind. A family visiting from Germany asked what on earth the big wooden box was, and I let the two children put their heads under the dark cloth to see the ground glass. Everything on it is upside down. They thought this was the funniest thing they had ever seen. So did I, the first time.

Glacier Point, 90mm and 210mm. Five sheets between 6:30 and 8:15 as the light lowered. Shadowed canyon on III throughout. Highlights moved from IX to VII as the sun went down: sheets marked N-1, N-1, N, N, N+1. 5 sheets. Sheets used: 11 of 24.

A rest morning. I walked over to the Village to Best's Studio, the place Virginia Adams's father started, and spent an hour in front of the prints on the walls. A good print of a photograph you have known all your life in books is a different thing entirely. The blacks go down and down.

At two the thunderheads that build over the high country every July afternoon came down into the Valley, and we had twenty minutes of hard rain and one crack of thunder that set off every car alarm in Curry Village. I drove to Valley View as fast as the speed limit allowed. The storm tore apart over El Capitan and Cathedral Rocks, with cloud pouring off the walls and the river shining. It was a summer storm, not a winter one, and it was not his. But it was mine, and I will take it.

Valley View, 90mm. Dark forest on III. Brightest cloud falls on IX, wet rock on V. N-1 for all three. 3 sheets. Sheets used: 14 of 24.

Up the Big Oak Flat Road and over the Tioga Road to the high country. Olmsted Point first, where the glaciers left boulders sitting on the bare granite like marbles on a table, and you look down Tenaya Canyon at the back side of Half Dome. Then Tenaya Lake, and on to Tuolumne Meadows at better than eight thousand feet, where a man of fifty-eight carrying a tripod stops to breathe more often than he would like.

Midday light up there is hard and blue, and the sky photographs far too pale without help. This is where the red filter earns its keep. It turns a blue sky dark and leaves the white granite white, the same trick Adams used on Half Dome in 1927. I am no Adams, but the filter does not know that.

Olmsted Point, 150mm, red filter (3 stops added). Boulder shadows on III, sunlit granite on IX. N-1. 2 sheets.
Tenaya Lake, 90mm, yellow filter. N. 2 sheets.
Tuolumne, 210mm, red filter. Domes on VIII. N. 2 sheets. Sheets used: 20 of 24.

Mirror Lake in the morning, which by July is half meadow, as it is most summers now, with one still pool left reflecting the cliffs. Then a long nap, which I recommend to all photographers over fifty.

In the evening, El Capitan Meadow. After the light was gone we lay in the grass on a blanket and watched the climbers' headlamps come on, one by one, high up on the wall, people spending the night three thousand feet in the air on purpose. Jean held my hand and said she was glad I had taken up photography and not that.

Mirror Lake, 150mm. Shaded cliff on III, pool falls on VII. N+1. 2 sheets.
El Capitan Meadow, dusk, 90mm. Very long exposures; meadow on III. N. 2 sheets. Sheets used: 24 of 24.

Broke camp after breakfast. Out of film, and glad of it. We stopped one last time at the Tunnel View at nine in the morning, in flat haze, and I stood at the wall for a while with no camera at all. Some days the best photograph is the one you only look at. Home to Fresno by early afternoon, to a yard that needed watering and a cat that would not speak to us.

The following week I developed all twenty-four sheets in trays in my garage darkroom, a few at a time, sorted by N, N-1 and N+1 according to my notes. Not one sheet was lost, which at my age I count as a small miracle. Of the twenty-four, I have three negatives I am truly proud of: the second Sentinel Bridge sheet, one from Glacier Point, and the first Valley View. The Valley View negative I will print at 16 by 20 for my classroom wall, where it will hang beside the gray scale I have taught from for thirty years. Three good negatives out of twenty-four is a very good week. The rest taught me something, which is what the rest are for.

<< Back to Moonrise Over the Valley  |  [email protected]