Wednesday Landscapes, 3 May 2017

You are invited to upload one of your landscape photos (or more than one, if an extra would help illustrate your objectives or process) and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on?

 

And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

This scene caught my eye on Monday as I was scrambling back up to the car after a hike (the objective of which was to shoot a waterfall to post in this thread; you might see that next week). ISO 400, 18-135 mm lens at 50 mm, f/9.0, 1/160 s, polarized; spot-metered (probably on the backlit foliage). The warm sunlight streaming in from the right had been what caught my eye, but the raw image was cold and flat in the sunlit areas. I cropped to exclude some sky on the left and some of the dark foreground. I reduced the exposure 1 stop in post (Lightroom), then added a radial gradient to reestablish the original exposure on the right and warmed it up a bit; I erased the gradient from the cliff on the right. I used an adjustment brush to open up the shadows on the foreground rocks and cliff and increased clarity there. Overall, I Increased the white point, reduced highlights, and slightly increased clarity and vibrance.

 

Pescadero Marsh

The photo shows highway 168 winding through the far Eastern edge of Califirnia with the White Mountains in the near backgroind and the snow covered Sierra Nevada Mountains in the far background. I was driving this rather obscure road to find the Ancient Brisclecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains, home of the oldest trees in the world, with some more than 4,000 years old. It is well worth visiting, and offers many photographic opportunities.

Glen, I just took a Google Earth virtual drive down 168 to see where that road was. What a desolate place. My question is why would they even put a road there?

My question is why would they even put a road there?

The road actually has quite a bit of history: it's part of the (Roosevelt) Midland Trail, one of the first, if not the first, marked transcontinental auto trails in America, connecting Washington D.C. (or New York City, depending on sources) with San Francisco and Los Angeles (the routing splits in Big Pine).

 

Doesn't really explain why there's a road there. Maybe Westgard Pass is one of the few passes through the White Mountains?

Edited May 5, 2017 by Dieter Schaefer

What a desolate place.

Westgard himself wrote: In trying to describe this most impressive gateway into California I should fail to do the beauty of the scenery full justice, so will quote literally from some literature sent out by the California-Nevada link of the Midland Trail Association: "Westerly from Westgard Pass is a view equaled in few parts of America. In the middle distance, a dozen miles away and nearly a mile below, lies the fertile Owens Valley, extending at right angles north and south over a hundred miles, and on the farther side, distant a score of miles, tower the snow-clad Sierras, with serrated crests and symmetric domes and peaks outlined against the sky at an approximate height of two and one-half miles vertical above the level of the ocean, and extending north and south far as the eye can see. The vision is rich reward for a journey of a thousand leagues."

Source: Motor Routes to the California Expositions - General Highway History - Highway History - Federal Highway Administration

Ancient Brisclecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains

Might as well post an image taken there some four years ago: Methuselah Grove

 

 

Methuselah is a 4845-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing high in the White Mountains of Inyo County in eastern California. For many years it was the world's oldest known living non-clonal organism(*), until superseded by the discovery in 2013 of another bristlecone pine in the same area with an age of 5063 years (germination in 3051 BC). The tree is named after Methuselah, a Biblical figure having the longest mentioned lifespan in the Bible of 969 years. Methuselah's exact location is undisclosed to protect it from vandalism.

 

(*)now believed to be a Creosote Bush, King Clone, an estimated 11,700 years old, near Lucerne Valley.

 

Thanks for the history Dieter. The road seems like it belongs in Nevada, not California. When I was there, just two days ago, the road to the Methusela Grove trail was still covered in snow for the last two miles, so I hiked it. There were two others who had done the same, but otherwise, no one was there.