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Dawn, Mono Lake (2011)
Eastern Sierra, California
One of the regular stops on
our Eastern Sierra photography workshop is
sunrise at Mono Lake. In fact, for most
photographers who come to this area Mono Lake is
a must-stop location. It's more than just
a body of water, a big body at that. It
has a rich geological history that makes it the
fascinating place that it is today.
It wasn't all that log ago
that Mono Lake's biggest attraction, the
endlessly fascinating tufa, was hidden beneath
its waters. But in the 1920s the city of
Los Angeles began diverting the streams that
flowed into the lake and send them south via the
California aqueduct. And the water level
began to drop. Eventually the tufa were
exposed and today have become a magnet to
photographers from all over the world.
The tufa formations are
nothing more than calcium carbonate secretions
formed when underwater springs discharge their
calcium rich waters into the briny waters of the
lake. These limestone structures form one
calcium atom at a time over countless years.
Los Angeles continued consume
the water flowing into Mono Lake and the level
of the lake continued to drop. The only
thing that prevented it from going the way of
its sister lake to the south, Owens Lake, and
becoming a dry lake bed was the tireless
advocacy of conservation groups. The issue
was eventually settled in the courts when Los
Angeles was ordered to restrict the amount of
water it took and to allow the lake to return to
previous levels to ensure the preservation of a
healthy, diverse and vibrant ecosystem.
The lake offers many moods for
the photographer. It sees glorious
sunrises and sunsets, brilliantly hot and bright
summer days, cold snowy winter nights, gale
force winds, calm and peaceful moments. I
never know what I will encounter and am
frequently surprised with what the lake offers
me.
I've photographed this angle
may times. It's a wonderful morning shot.
Mt Dana and Mt Gibbs form a towering backdrop to
the tufa and the waters of the lake. On
most mornings I have been drawn to the fiery
first light on the peaks. The sun can
ignite them into an explosion of oranges and
yellows. But this morning I was the drama
in an otherwise quite, peaceful scene that spoke
to me.
The light this time of day is
exquisite and one of my favorites. I
stopped down to get a suitable depth of field
which increased the exposure length in the dim
light. This produced a pleasant blurred
effect in the gently rippling water.
I cropped the photograph into
a more elongated format. It's not a panorama but
also is not one of your more common aspect
ratios (2X3 or 4X5). I felt it was
necessary to crop it this way to eliminate the
negative space in the blue sky and on the
water's surface. This fills the frame with
the subjects which are the tufa and the snow
covered peaks.
Images captured in this light
are inherently low contrast. This provides
an opportunity to add contrast in the post
processing which is one of the elements that
makes the final images so interesting (and why I
love this light so much). In situations
like this the image benefits a great deal from a
black point - tiny, imperceptible areas that are
pure black It doesn't take much to create
an effect that is both dramatic and subtle.
The dynamic range can be further extended by
brightening the light areas of the image.
I chose to darken the blues and brighten the
faint yellows in the tufa to further enhance the
contrast and produce a more intense effect.
As for the overall hue of the
image I stayed with the inherent color of the
natural light at this time of day - which is
blue. The blue cast provides a calmness to
the image that will evaporate in the bright
direct sunlight. But to give the image a
little dramatic punch I made the yellows of the
tufa a bit more intense. This contrasts
with the predominant blues. The overall
effect is a quite intensity that, for me, makes
this image stand out.
In some ways the intensity of
the photograph reflects the intensity of the
efforts that have gone in to protecting and
preserving the treasure we know as Mono Lake.
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