I took one more trip to Yosemite on Sunday night because of the holiday and the fect that I’ll soon start traveling for the MotoGP season. I figured I might get one more opportunity to capture Horsetail Fall from a different perspective, hoping that the sun’s arc hadn’t passed beyond the narrow range required to throw the orange light in its special way. Things didn’t work out, as I’ll describe briefely below, so I’m including instead a photograph I made at sunset from the valley floor. Snow was falling at the time, as was the ambient light, so I decided to try a technique I’d first seen done by William Neill in which during a long exposure, the camera is moved slowly up and down several times to blur the details while retaining the general shapes of the subject matter. Given the snow fall at the time, this image seem to me to give a better impression of the snowy action than I have otherwise been able to convey with a faster exposure. Thanks to Mr. Neill for sharing this technique!
I’d not been to Yosemite on a weekend for some time, and while I’ve been amazed at the number of tripods being toted around on my recent visits, that was nothing to Sunday’s crowd. Due to a lunch date I’d arrived in the valley much later than desired, and I found each and every parking area on the valley’s road to be packed with cars. I turned around and followed Northside back toward El Capitan to find the same thing. The valley was so crowded I couldn’t believe it, given the dodgy road conditions and frigid temperature. I managed to squeeze the truck almost completely off the road and into some snow about as far west as I could go and still see Horsetail Fall. A line of thick clouds on the western horizon made success very much in uncertain as the sun descended, but for some time we were still able to see bright sunlight on the face of El Capitan.
The lighted area grew smaller and smaller until, about 5 minutes or so before we could expect to see some glowing orange light, the sun dropped beneath the clouds and the magic light disappeared. That took about 10 seconds to go from “Come on, hang in there sun!” to “Awwwwww.” The above image shows the scene just before the light went out and left all of El Cap in shadow.
I felt really bad for the literally hundreds of photographers who had been waiting to see the phenomenon that I’d been so lucky to witness a few weeks ago. I couldn’t help thinking that among all those people had to be some who might be visiting from far away, having come at this time or year just for this occasion. I could only hope that they’d seen the magic earlier in the week or could perhaps stay another day and try again. Time is certainly running out for the light on Horsetail Fall in 2011, and again, but with a new appreciation, I felt grateful for how incredibly lucky I’d been to see and capture the event on my first try. I may not see it again for years.
