You Can’t Always Get What You Want…

Gary Hart Photography: Autumn Accent, Half Dome, Yosemite

Autumn Accent, Half Dome, Yosemite
Sony a7RIV
Sony 24-105 G
1 second
F/16
ISO 100

(Offered with apologies to the Rolling Stones)

I looked that night at the reflection
My focus app in my hand
I pondered my focus selection
About six feet from where I stand

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need

What we wanted was clouds; what we got was, well, the opposite of clouds.

Photographers love clouds for the soft light they spread across the landscape, and their potential to add color and drama to the sky. And if you’ve been following my recent blogs, you no doubt know about wall-to-wall blue skies in last month’s Yosemite Fall Color workshop. But perfect light and spectacular skies can make photographers lazy; on the other hand, dealing with conditions that are less than ideal can create opportunities that otherwise would have been missed.

Throughout the workshop I strongly encouraged everyone to minimize or eliminate the sky and emphasize the reflection rather than the primary object (Half Dome, El Capitan, or whatever). That approach is especially effective on sunny days because the best reflections usually happen with the subject is fully lit, the brighter the better, and we took full advantage.

The other half of the reflection equation is a shaded reflective surface. Long removed from the fury of the spring snow melt, but not yet bolstered by the winter storm reinforcements, in autumn the Merced River provides reflections at most riverside stops. And while Yosemite’s towering granite walls create nice shade in any season if you know where to look, the low sun of autumn and winter spreads the shade farther and longer—by late autumn, some sections of the Merced get little or no sun all day.

Which is why during this workshop I chose most of our photo spots for their reflection potential. Since this was the first Yosemite visit for many in the group, at each stop I’d suggest starting with the more conventional mirror reflection compostion (the primary subject above its inverted counterpart), but then move on to compositions that concentrate on the reflection itself.

One important aspect of reflection-only compositions is foreground elements to orient the viewer, a solid object between the reflection and the reflective subject to signal that the world is in fact not upside down. Sometimes a small section of the opposite shore works (taking care to avoid direct sunlight that can pull the eye away from the reflection), but I especially like adding foreground elements that mingle with the reflection.

A side benefit of a reflection-only approach is exposure management, because photographing a fully lit primary subject along with its shaded reflection creates dynamic range challenges. Even if you can capture the scene’s entire range of light, the sunlit subject and blue sky are often washed out, while the reflection and its surroundings remain relatively dark. Since the human eye is drawn to a scene’s brightest elements, the shaded reflection is easily overshadowed (pun unavoidable). On the other hand, eliminating the sunlit portion of the scene makes exposure a snap.

I found this little scene beside the Merced River on the workshop’s final shoot. Arriving just as the face of Half Dome was starting to warm with late light, I scanned the riverbank until I found an accumulation of yellow cottonwood leaves jettisoned by trees just upstream. I actually started with my Sony 100-400 GM lens on my Sony a7RIV, targeting a tight composition that featured a pair of leaves (faintly visible here in the dark trees reflected just beneath Half Dome) embedded in the face of Half Dome. But I wanted to include more of the colorful leaves, so I switched to my Sony 24-105 f/4 G lens.

This might be a good time to mention the significant difference an even slight position shift can make in a reflection image. From my original vantage point, Half Dome’s reflection was surrounded by a large void of bland, empty water; including all the leaves from that position required a wide composition that shrunk Half Dome and added a lot of extraneous scene. But moving back slightly and dropping my camera to near river level move the yellow leaves and Half Dome, framing the reflection with color and eliminating most of the empty water.

Another essential and often overlooked consideration when photographing reflections is the counterintuitive truth that the focus point for a reflection is the reflective subject, not the reflective surface. That means that in this scene, even though its reflection was bobbing on water no more than ten feet away, because Half Dome was about three miles distant, the reflection’s focus point is infinity (the same as Half Dome). When you stop to consider that I’m also including leaves that are no more than five feet away, you realize that I have depth of field issues to consider.

My focal length here was around 35mm, and while I wanted Half Dome’s reflection sharp, the leaves had to be sharp. A quick check of my hyperfocal app told me the hyperfocal distance for 35mm at f/16 (the smallest aperture I use unless I have no other option) was around 8 feet (on my full frame Sony body). In extreme depth of field scenes, not only do I want to bias my sharpness to the closer object(s), when the more distant object is a reflection, a little softness is even more tolerable. Since the hyperfocal tables are based on a fairly liberal definition of “acceptable sharpness,” I focused about six feet into the frame to maximize the leaves’ sharpness. And as you can see, Half Dome turned out pretty darn sharp.

Everyone wants spectacular conditions, and while we may not have gotten what we want, after seeing the results of the workshop (both my own and the group’s), it appears that we got just we need.