Olmstead Point, Yosemite 2018

A few weeks ago Ann mentioned something from an e-mail that I’d skimmed over (and missed) in the middle of my workday.  When I checked it out the next morning (before starting work), I knew I couldn’t pass it up.  As it turned out, neither could Ann.  So last Friday we began our first workshop ever - live, online with Charlie Waite.  For the next four Fridays (5 total), Ann and I, along with 9 others, are joining Charlie via Zoom in a workshop called Thinking Photography.  We’ve already gotten our money’s worth and are excited for the next month of Fridays (particularly given we’re still in lockdown).  

Anyway, one of Charlie’s photographs that he discussed was from Olmstead Point in Yosemite - a lovely square image of granite, a rock, a tree and sky.  Given that we’d been there, I decided to look at my images from that morning and see if I should work on one or more of them.  And given that Charlie’s was a square image, and that he is one of the photographers (along with Michael Kenna) that got me really thinking about square images, I decided to select a square image to work with.

For those who don’t know, Olmstead Point is at the northern end of the Yosemite Valley and from its granite outcropping, you can see Half Dome in all its splendor.  That, of course is what I photographed and fortunately we were there in the early dawn light (despite the bitingly cold temperatures).  If my memory is correct (and it is), I’d hope to have gotten there sooner, but the drive from our campsite was a bit longer than I’d expected and speeding in the dark on an unknown windy road was not part of the plan.  So much of the deep pre-dawn color was out of the sky.  But that didn’t stop me from working with what I had

There was plenty of beauty to be had and much to work with compositionally, so making a decent image that morning wasn’t too difficult.

Given that I’ve been in an educational frame of mind, it dawned on me (like the pun?) that my first efforts at developing the image were not as successful as I’d hoped and I pulled a phrase out of the recesses of my mind and posed a question to Ann, “Hey, do you know anything about luminosity masks in Capture One?  What are they good for?”  When she said, “Well, skies for one thing . . . “ I immediately replied, “Can you teach me how to do them?”  Which she did (one of the benefits of Ann’s retirement!).  

In part what pleases me so much about the above image is that I’ve learned a technique that allowed me to keep the skies as they were, with that faint warm color of sunlight before the sunlight hits ground.  All of the other techniques I previously tried just made the skies . . . wrong.  

So that’s it for now.  A news update on our workshop, a new Capture One development technique learned, and a chance to spend some time with a lovely image.