Yosemite Photo Trip

Last week, we spent a few days at the Yosemite National Park.
I have not been to Yosemite for over 10 years. Last time when I was there, I was still shooting with my film camera using Kodak TriX black-and-white film. The picture on the left was the contact sheets I found. I have been shooting a lot of TriX a lot before that trip, so it was a lot of fun to use it to shoot some great landscape.

This time the bags were a lot heavier as I have more equipments to carry. Also this time is all digital. I got to see the pictures the minute I copied from the card to the computer. No more waiting for the contact sheet.

I am also trying to do something different this time. There are thousands, if not millions, of photographs about Yosemite. Nowadays, everyone has a digital camera and everyone is taking pictures. If your pictures come out good, then they will look just like the postcards you can buy for 50 cents each. Most likely your pictures will not come out as good as the postcards. My idea is not to capture some typical "I was here" tourist pictures. I want to capture something different. Something more interesting than a postcard like picture. Here are some of the pictures I took:

While everyone at Glacier Point looking at the Half Dome during sunset, I went around shooting at the people. I found this kid looking through his binocular and I think it is a cool picture.


This picture was taken at Mirror Lake. While everyone was taking picture of the reflection of the mountains on the lake, I found three hikers crossing the lake at the edge of the lake. Again I found that very interesting.

The next two pictures are similar to a typical tourist pictures. I used these pictures to practice some HDR post processing. I shot with bracketing and then combine them to generate these images. I am not too excited about them but I think they are OK to be sent to Mom. :-)