Upper Young Lake Backpacking (July 17-19, 2010)

Beautiful alpine scenery and clean air thick with dirty mosquitoes: that’s how I remember Young Lakes nearly a year later as I write this.  Arun and I met up on a Friday morning and started the long drive North.  The first 4 hours pass slowly, but eventually we make it to Lone Pine.  Now I finally feel like we’re getting somewhere.  More importantly it’s time for lunch.  After getting our last real meal for a few days, we’re back on the road.

As we’re driving North on 395 the weather is awesome.  Dark clouds surround us and thunder explodes in the mountains to our West.  By the time we get to the permit office near the Tioga Pass entrance, not much has changed.  We pick up the permits, a small orange trowel and head off to find a campsite.  It’s getting late in the day and every campsite at the Tuolumne Meadows backpacker’s camp is taken.  Rumor has it you can just set up camp anywhere, so we do.  Afterwards we drive West a few miles to enjoy what’s shaping up to be a spectacular sunset.  I’m thinking how nice it would be to have a great image in the bag before even starting the real trip.  The weather quickly clears up and the sunset is uninspiring.  I take a few pictures, but feeling uninspired results in images that are, well, uninspiring.

The next morning we make a quick trip towards Tenaya Lake for a lackluster sunrise, return to pack up our gear, and start the hike towards Young Lakes.  I’m excited to get away from the crowds that exist within a mile of every paved road in Yosemite, and spend a few days in the wilderness.  Our permit for the way in is Young Lakes via the Glen Aulin Trail.  Heading towards Glen Aulin the trail is dead flat and the first 2 miles pass very quickly.  Then we break away from the Glen Aulin Trail and start the gradual climb towards Young Lakes.  As we’re hiking the remaining 5 miles to Lower Young Lake I’m feeling pretty good.  There’s plenty of shade and the night spent at high elevation prior to starting the hike was worth it: I’m showing no signs of altitude sickness.  I am however questioning this desire to photograph.  The hike would be so much easier without 10 lbs of photography gear.  We arrive at Lower Young and have lunch before hiking the last mile or so to Upper Young.  There are plenty of places to camp along the side of Upper Young Lake and we pick a spot right away so we can set down our packs.

After relaxing a little and filling up the water bottles, I started wandering around, looking for something interesting to photograph.  The first evening is kind of tricky since I don’t know what’s going to be in light and what’s going to be in shadow as the sun sets.  I make one image that I’m happy with and a bunch that fall into the good, but not good enough category.  I walk back to camp.  That’s a neat feeling to photograph this incredible place and then walk 200 feet to camp.  As it gets dark I climb into the tent, look through the pictures I’ve just taken and look at the couple of pictures of my wife and son that I’ve left on the memory card.  What the fuck am I doing 500 miles away from my little boy?

Upper Young Lake Reflections

The next morning I’m up early and making some photographs.  In between shooting I’m keeping an eye on the small island in the lake.  I’ve seen photographs of this before and know that the light will hit that island while the granite walls along the South side of the lake are in shade.  I can tell the sun is nearly high enough to clear the mountains to the East, but the light is hitting parts of the wall that I want to be the background for my shot.  I find a spot to safely hop over the creek that exits Upper Young and get a view with nothing but shaded granite behind the island.  A little while later the sun lights up the trees on the island, then a little section of grass to the left of the island and finally a bigger section of grassy area behind the island.  I try several different compositions and make dozens of exposures before the light gets too harsh.

After eating breakfast I review the morning’s images.  None of them are quite right.  But, between reviewing the images and going back to the spot I’ve photographed from (and making a few test images in mid-day light) I figure out exactly how I want to photograph that island the next morning.  I spend the rest of the day wandering around the lake, scouting for images and of course wondering what the fuck I’m doing 500 miles away from my little boy.

As sunset nears I’m hoping to re-shoot one scene from the previous evening that I mostly liked but had a few little imperfections that I wanted to clean up.  But, there are no clouds, and without clouds it simply does not work.  I start moving towards the far end of the lake where there are a few compositions I scouted out earlier in the day.  On my way I walk by the little pine tree that’s in Charles Cramer’s famous image from Upper Young Lake.  I have no desire to duplicate his image, but I stop.  Is it obvious because it’s obvious, or because Charles Cramer made it obvious?  I compose one shot, a more telephoto view than Cramer’s, make a few exposures and move on.  It turns out to be my best shot of the evening.  I go to bed excited about the next day.  I’m certain I’ll get the shot I want of that island.  And as soon as I do I’ll be heading home.

Shoreline at Sunset, Upper Young Lake

The final morning I know exactly what I want to photograph.  I wake up, eat breakfast, get water and pack up everything.  I head over to my spot and compose the island exactly the way I want it.  When the sun clears the mountains to the East, I’m ready to go and make several exposures to make sure I’ve got what I want: my best shot of Upper Young Lake.  Afterwards I take a few more shots, which I later stitch into a 60 MegaPixel panorama.  Arun and I grab our packs and head out via the Dog Lake trail.  Now I have one goal in mind: to make it home before my boy goes to sleep.  Along the way we comment on how fortunate we were to get Glen Aulin on the way in.  Dog Lake had much more up and down, and felt like a much more difficult trail going towards Young Lakes.  But, it was mostly downhill on the way out and within 4 hours we were in my car and driving East towards 395.  We make one stop for fast food in Lone Pine, choosing to eat in the car with the AC blasting on a 100 degree day, and sparing others the misery of being around 2 guys that have a few days and a lot of miles since last showering.

It’s just getting dark as we make it back to San Diego and Lucas is still wide awake.  He’s excited to see me.  The look on my wife’s face tells me she’ll be happier to have me home once I’ve showered.

Illuminated Island, Upper Young Lake

Doubt & Volume

Whenever I’m preparing to go on vacation, the thought of making great photographs is on my mind. This is usually accompanied by the hope for spectacular weather, which is a major ingredient to great photographs, but completely out of my control. As I prepared for a 6 day trip to Sequoia and Yosemite I wanted to come up with something to work on, something that I could do to be a better photographer 6 days later. I went looking for ideas in LensWork and came across an article titled Twenty-one Ways to Improve Your Artwork in LensWork 58 from May-June 2005. Number 1 on the list was “Shoot more than you do… There is a great deal to be gained in sheer volume – not that volume itself is any virtue, but practice is…”

Without question I am very selective when I’m photographing. I’m also a little bit lazy — taking out the tripod, composing, moving the tripod a little, re-composing, selecting where to focus, selecting the aperture, re-composing, switching lenses, etc. It’s not hard work, but it is work. In a way I think it’s good to think about what I’m doing and try to get things perfect. But somewhere along the line my combination of selectiveness and laziness has become an obstacle to improving my photography because it has resulted in me taking very few photographs. And it’s ridiculous to think that I’ll improve at a rate I’m happy with when I’m making very few photographs, and therefore have few experiences to learn from.

I also thought back to something related that I had read in On Being a Photographer by David Hurn and Bill Jay.  “… very often the difference between an average photographer and a really fine photographer is the willingness to admit doubt … willing to try all sorts of subtle permutations to increase the success rate. This is very, very different from the notion of shooting a lot of pictures and hoping to find something worth printing.”

For me, this provided an answer to how to produce a lot of photographs. I have this idea in the back of my mind that great photographers go out, find something interesting, work to find the best composition, make an exposure and move on. I have this idea that they don’t make bad photographs. No time wasted on exposures that weren’t going to be printed. But I’m certainly not at that level. And the authors are saying that the great photographers aren’t either. So on this trip, I decided to take that pressure of perfection off myself. I made it a goal to shoot more, and not wildly photograph everything, but find something that interested me and photograph it many times, making small changes in composition, or shutter speed, or whatever might make that little difference between good and really good. I wasn’t going to worry about whether including or excluding something was the right choice. Sometimes it is obvious, but other times it’s too close to call. I was just going to be aware that it would make a difference, and photograph it multiple ways and figure out what was best by doing the final editing at home later. I wouldn’t get caught in this part selective, part lazy mindset. I wanted to come home having learned as much as I could (and hopefully with some good photographs too).

Dogwoods over the Merced River

I had never been to Yosemite Valley in early May when the Dogwoods are in bloom. It truly was spectacular, and despite the fact that they have been photographed to the point of becoming iconic, I couldn’t resist photographing them myself (on 3 separate occasions). When I found an interesting scene I tried several variations on the same general composition. Also, since the river always looked slightly different, depending on where the white parts of the water were, I made several exposures of the same composition at the same shutter speed. I didn’t worry about when the perfect time was to press the shutter. It was too unpredictable. I just understood that it made a difference and I’d take several shots to increase the likelihood that I’d get a photograph I liked (I was mostly wanting for the brightest parts of the water to be away from the edges of the frame and not overlapping any of the white dogwood flowers). I also experimented with shutter speed knowing that this would make a difference in the texture of the water. I admitted doubt. I didn’t doubt that I was close to having something good. I wasn’t confused and just firing off shots. I had a pretty clear idea of what I was trying to do, but I spent a lot of time experimenting, acknowledging that small changes in composition, shutter speed and the random texture of the river could be the difference between a photograph that was good and a photograph that I wanted on my wall.