This image of Cathedral Rocks in Yosemite Valley is interesting to me because it has become one of my favorite photographs of the trip, and I almost didn’t bother to get out of the car to take it. We had spent the morning camped on the shore of the Merced River, waiting for the sunlight to warm up the east face of El Capitan. It was a great spot, and one I’m sure I’ll return to at a different time of the year. We were unlucky in that the sun’s path in June didn’t do much from our perspective. Again, it was one of those cases where it’s difficult to be in the right place at the right time when your experience of the park is based not on living there for 20 or 30 years, but on showing up for a few days and taking your chances. I think we all left a bit disappointed, having risen so early and hoped for so much.
We had to head farther into the valley along the one way road in order to turn around and head back out, and as we passed this view of Catherdral Rocks, Tyler stopped the car and got out to shoot. I was in the back seat with my eyes closed and casually looked outside to see what there was to see. As with most turn outs in the valley, the view was great, but at the time it didn’t look like much of a photograph. I was pretty happy where I was, warm and dozing in the back seat, so I closed my eyes again and listened to the sounds of my fellow photographers getting off their butts and going to work.
It occurred to me that I’d not gotten a decent reflection in a photograph, but that the Cathedral Rocks were quite distinct in this calm section of the swollen river. So I trundled out of the car and got a camera out, not bothering with a tripod, lazy git that I sometimes am. As my friends worked according to their own impulses, I noticed a fallen tree that was lying half submerged on the shore. I walked out to the end of the above-water section and made a few exposures, of which this is one. The lens I’d picked was not quite wide enough to get all I wanted in the frame in landscape mode, but this portrait version isolates the main character of Cathedral Rocks nicely enough. I walked back up the tree to the road and went looking for my wide angle lens.
I was foiled, however, by some German tourists who had stopped at the same spot. Each had DSLRs and the wife had been waiting her turn on the fallen tree. The husband was not so bold, and stayed with his camera on the road’s shoulder. The wife carefully made her way down the length of the tree, moving into deeper and deeper water. Good for her, I thought, as she bravely balanced her way down to get the photograph she sought. The husband barked something Germanic that apparently meant, Keep going! She looked up at him, not wearing the face of artistic courage but of a spouse asked to do yet another dodgy task for the good of the family photo album. When she’d taken another step, the husband raised his camera and took her picture beneath the Cathedral Rocks of Yosemite Valley. It’s probably quite a nice photograph.
By this time my friends had packed up and were ready to move on, so I didn’t bother to collect my wide angle lens and wait for the wife to make it safely back to shore. I should’ve asked my friends to indulge me. As ever, I don’t regret the photographs I do make–I only regret the ones I don’t. But at least I got out of the car and made this one. I’m waiting patiently to see what the other guys came up with from this spot. Seeing what others have done from the same location at the same time is part of the pleasure of such a trip.
