Tunnel View. Yosemite Valley. Nikon D5500, Nikkor 35mm, f/3.5, ISO 1000, 10 sec
Yosemite Valley has always been a special place to me. The giant granite walls that loom over you from every direction gives you a sense of how small you are in this world and that’s very humbling. However, since I really got into photography in 2015 I have only been to Yosemite twice. Once in May of 2017 during a storm that made the Merced flow higher than I’ve ever seen it and the most recent time was last summer on the June 13-14 weekend.
The 2017 trip was unique trip as it rained on and off both days. We didn’t know it at the time but Alex Honnold was above us on El Capitan practicing for his “free solo” that would win him the Oscar. Since this was the first time I had been in Yosemite with my DSLR, I really wanted to shoot some long expo time lapses of the stars over Half Dome. But our trip was so short that there wasn’t much time to do that. Since it was early May it wasn’t fully dark until after 8pm and we had a 6am morning ahead of us for a Mist Trail hike the next day. So there wasn’t a large window for me to shoot. Also, we weren’t even staying in the valley that night so there was at least a 30 minute drive to get to the hotel off Highway 140.
We came to the conclusion that the only time I’d have to shoot would be to hit the Tunnel View on the way back to the hotel. I was hoping to be up there by 9pm so I’d have maybe an hour to capture an amazing time lapse. That’s plenty of time.
We arrived in the valley much later than I would have liked thanks to epic traffic going over Pacheco Pass. By the time we parked and smelled the pine it was after 5pm so we only had time for a brief hike underneath Royal Arches.
After devouring a Curry Village pizza it was after 8:30pm and we still had to walk back to my car over at the Ahwahnee. Using only the lights from our phones we navigated our way through complete darkness across the valley. It was hard to say but either a deer or a sasquatch ran right by us before we got back to the Honda.
It’s was after 9pm before we left the Ahwahnee parking lot and we made a b-line for the Tunnel View. As I hadn’t been in the park in 7 years I mistakenly turned off Northside Drive too soon and had to go all the way back to Yosemite Village before I could turn around. This easily cost me an extra 15 mins of shooting time. Damn.
We finally arrive at the Tunnel View and I get my first shot off at 9:54pm. Almost an hour later than I would have liked, but, here we are. The valley was dark. Only the odd tail light from distant cars were seen as they winded their way through the valley. There was no wind. Very peaceful. The moon was bright and behind us, illuminating the face of Half Dome, a little over 8 miles away. Don’t get me wrong, it was still very dark. So dark that you needed to take a few long exposures, study them, and then adjust your angle appropriately. Although the lunar light was killing our chances of seeing a vast field of stars, it was enhancing my photos of the granite walls.
After taking 179 exposures I wrapped up the shoot at 10:33pm. A brief visit but the shots I came away with were quite spectacular. It would be another day before I could get home and edit the best ones. Part of the excitement of shooting those long exposure night shots while traveling is not knowing what you captured until you upload your photos onto the big screen at home. Sure you can see what you’ve taken on your camera’s LCD screen but seeing your high res images on a 27inch iMac is what it’s all about.
For example, in the Tunnel View time lapse I shot, you can see lights from climbers on El Capitan and beyond. And not only can you see them, but in the finished time lapse you can watch them progress up the cliff face. We were not aware of that in real time.
So that’s the story of the above photo. A long day with only a narrow window of time and I came away with a pretty amazing shot. The Mist Trail hike the following day is a story that deserves its own blog.
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Timelapse video from the Tunnel View.
