At Least I Can Say I've Been There

I haven't been there yet, so i will have to hope there are more from yosemite in your files....

I don't think you can photograph Yosemite until you've been there a few times, and then some. The place is so awesome, yet intimate. There is detail at every level. My poor Australian brain was trying to get a handle on the scale of things and just as I thought I'd done it, someone pointed out a climber on El Capitan. You could hardly see him with the naked eye.... a flea on a wall. When I looked through the binoculars that "flea" turned out to be FOUR climbers. And there were lots more dotted about the place...we're just not used to 4,000 foot sheer cliffs in Oz, your brain has to adjust to Yosemite. Go there before you die.

<< The "Kindly Opening">> As my defensive title says, "At least I can say I've been there", Mike. Thanks for your blunt (but always impeccably honest and forthright) comment.

 

<< The "Killer-Punch">> BTW, "competant" ends in "ent".

 

[How's that? I call this variation: "The Old One-Two"].

It looks like the title's meaning flew over his head, oh well mike, you can't winnem' all.

[As Terrence goes scrabbling through his pictures on photo.net] Let me state this for the record... Mike Spinak is one of the most honest and blunt critics on this site - and I welcome his critiques - good or bad. Not only that, he's photogenic as well.

Not sure how I stumbled upon this photo but I am glad that I did. Stuck in the fens of UK I dream of being somewhere like this.

Nice photo. Stunning folders.

 

 

America is such a rich country, some say too rich. Putting that to one side, what really irks me is that, with all this economic wealth and geopolitical power, it also has such amazing scenic riches as well.

 

An interesting sidelight to Yosemite is that when the declaration of the park looked shaky, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir went camping in Yosemite for four days, alone - just the two of them. When they came back Roosevelt told Muir, "Mr. Muir, you got your park." I can hardly imagine today's President, George Dubya, being that magnanimous.

Blunt, being a term which brings to mind a tool which gets nothing done without a great deal of effort, and then leaves quite a droogy mess in the end, may not describe these observations, so efficient they miss the target and where they may land, i cannot say?

Mike is direct and to the point and, in my opinion, says a lot of things that need to be said on this site. I like him that way. I wouldn't have him ANY other way. We need a little "truth" out there on photo.net... even if it offends (possibly a little bit) sensitive souls from time to time. I've been quite guilty of this myself (at both ends of the stick). One photonetter emailed me and told me keep out of Arizona, lest I be gunned down (by him) on sight (although I am 99.99999% sure he would not have gone through with it). Sheesh! All I did was call him a word referring to a posterior body cavity (a genuine term of endearment here in Australia) in response to some ill-considered and perhaps offensive remarks he had made to another photo.netter.

 

[Note: on my recent trip to America, I did, however, stay well clear of Arizona.]

Truth is always good, this being a good time avoid nonsense about the camera and it's inability to lie, but where one may blurr his background to make his point, and yet another is off in the woods bouncing his flash, there but for the graces of gawd go I, fiddling with found ways to put across the low-down, accomplishing the same but sparing useless toe-steppings, as english is a language affording such things~

(Was ^^^ THIS ^^^ written by one of those random word programs?).

No, but I'll take that as a compliment, words have always been fun for me, and (as with many areas of life in these technology laden times) I'd been worried that the garbled sentences voice recognition programs can deliver were somehow just as good as the real thing - I feel better now. :-)

Damnit, now not only do I have to marvel at Dummett's work, I now have to read all the comments made about it because they are entertaining as anything =)

 

Keep up the good work, photographically and written!

Love your title Tony. Wish I could say I've been there myself.. Good Color and feeling of the grandness is evident in this image.. I would have cropped out above the shadow...find the shadow and foreground grass takes away from the shot... Maybe someday I'll get there. This has been such a wonderfully entertaining page. Thank you all...

I find this photo to be surprisingly dull compared to the your other, mostly excellent photographs. I do note, however, that this photograph is rated higher than this one by our fellow photo.net members. What am I missing?

If you are impressed by the scale of Yosemite, consider a trip to Nepal, where I took this shot. Although by no means a great photo, it is one of the few I took that really shows the shear scale of the Himalayas. The distance from the bottom of the valley to the top of the peak is over 16000 feet.

Now this is Yosemite!

More than not the photos you see of Yosemite

are of Half Dome, El Capitan, Glacier Point etc. etc. The valley itself where the beauty lies with

the view of the giants surrounding it is often ignored.

I live 3 hours from Yosemite and it's my

favorite place on earth. I've been there more

times than I can count ... this photo puts me

there today, sets me in the valley and shows what

I would really be seeing if I were physically there.

After writing all that can I now say "WOW!" Tony?