Autumn in the Sierra
Imagine you’re at a roadside overlook and you see a stunning sunset, or you’re hiking through a forest and you want to photograph a particular tree. You reach into your phone and snap a picture, only to realize later on that the picture looked nothing like what you saw. Perhaps the sunset looked too flat or the forest too cluttered.
Our brains make unconscious inferences about what we see, allowing us to simplify and make sense of the world around us. At the same time, our eyes can also see a far wide range of light than most cameras can capture (with some notable exceptions). While evolutionarily useful, these traits make photography a bit of a challenge, as our eyes will never quite see the world the way a camera does.
I truly understood this problem the first time I ever photographed fall foliage, in October 2021. Though I made some fine pictures on that trip to the Sierra Nevada, I had trouble translating what I saw into coherent photos. I struggled specifically with photographing dense forests. Scenes of beautiful aspen trees that appeared neat and tidy to my eyes turned out cluttered and chaotic. Swaths of vibrant yellow leaves that lit up in direct sunlight looked garish. This year, I wanted to revisit the Sierra with an extra year’s worth of experience under my belt and make up for last year’s struggles.
The range of elevations in the Sierra, from 10,000+ feet down to 4,000, means that autumn comes at different times for different places. Leaves might begin to turn at 10,000 feet in late-September, even as trees at 8,000 feet stay bright green for another two to three weeks. For that reason, I knew I could not time a trip to perfectly coincide with peak color in all the areas I wanted to visit. Instead, I decided on a middle ground: I would visit twice. I scheduled trips for the first and second weekends of October, knowing that I could find fall color at different elevations on each trip.
My first trip started on the first weekend of October. I arrived on Friday night on the eastside of the Sierra after a long day of driving, and woke up early for sunrise the next day, which coincided with good fall color at North Lake. Last year, I arrived there a week after the leaves had fallen off of the trees at that location, and regretted missing the opportunity to witness fall color there. This time, I arrived just as the trees started to turn.
The lighting situation for sunrises at North Lake presents some tricky technical challenges. For most sunrise/sunset scenes with a bright sky and dark foreground, I use graduated neutral density filters in front of my lens to even out the contrast and keep it within the narrow exposure latitude of my film. However, those filters only work when the lighting in a scene evenly gradates from dark to light. North Lake does not do that, as the bright sky overlaps with dim shadows throughout the scene. As a result, I photographed the scene on two cameras loaded with different films using a variety of different grad filters to hedge my bets. Within the first hour of sunset, I had burned through almost an entire roll’s worth of pictures across the two cameras. From those photos, I found two that satisfactorily depicted the scene I saw that day.
The first, on Fujifilm Velvia 50, showed the strong pre-dawn alpenglow on the peaks with some rich, dark shadows in the foreground. The second, shot on Provia 100F, came about an hour after sunrise, when the warm even light of morning lit up the entire scene. I left North Lake unsure of whether I had a passable photograph from that morning. In fact, I felt so convinced I had botched the first attempt that I returned there two more times that weekend, though with less satisfactory results.
On my way down, I spotted a grove of aspen trees situated just below a row of peaks. I loved the juxtaposition of the yellow aspens against the bright Sierra peaks in the background. I retrieved my gear from the trunk and set up my tripod and camera kit. I pulled in with an 80-200mm telephoto lens and found a balanced composition, but then I encountered a problem. The peaks were too bright. I needed my graduated ND filters, except even they seemed insufficient. Grad filters work best with scenes that smoothly transition from near to far, dim to bright. However, the canyon slopes overlapped and crisscrossed the scene, meaning that the bright mountains immediately transitioned into the dim granite of the canyon. A grad filter with a smooth gradient wouldn’t work. Instead, I opted to use a filter with a hard edge, hoping to keep the mountains dim while leaving the foreground just bright enough to be visible.
Yeah, that’s not a great looking picture. The aspens look way too bright and there’s a weird dark spot on the canyon walls—all a result of using a hard-edged filter. It certainly didn’t match what my eyes saw. Initially I figured this photo was a goner. That is, until I put the file through some mind-boggling, AI-powered wizardry on Adobe Lightroom, which allowed me to finely tune the lighting and color on each individual layer of rock and trees. After some finagling, I produced a picture which more closely matched the scene I saw that day.
I explored the rest of Bishop Creek Canyon for most of the day and found even more gorgeous color. Most of the canyon remained green, but patches of bright orange and yellow showed up throughout the area. Initially I wished that more of the trees had turned yellow and orange. But then I realized I could use that patchiness to my advantage. Our eyes perceive certain colors as more vibrant when they’re juxtaposed against a contrasting one. Aspen leaves in the canyon looked particularly vivid when set against a background of dark green trees or granite.
Soon, I hit my stride. I stopped my car every few minutes as each turn in the road seemed to reveal yet another beautiful patch of foliage.
At the end of the day, I realized I had burned through about four rolls of film. Since I had only brought eight rolls for the entire weekend, I decided to dial back my frenzied picture taking. I spent the rest of the weekend revisiting areas I had explored on the first day and finding new spots I missed. Despite my best efforts to conserve my film, I eventually using up every single roll of film that I had brought with me that weekend.
I received my film back from the lab during the week between my first and second trip. As a result, I had a rare opportunity to see which photos had turned out and make a mental checklist of which ones I wanted to attempt again in just a few days. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at the results. I had accumulated quite a few “keepers” from the trip. However, there were still a few scenes that hadn’t turned out quite the way I wanted, so I eagerly made the six-hour drive back over the Sierra for a second consecutive weekend.
On the first morning, I returned to North Lake, curious to see how the scene had changed. I arrived to find a circus. Cars gingerly swerved in and out of the tiny day-use parking lot by the lake as photographers and illegally parked vehicles cluttered the road. Meanwhile, an entire crowd had gathered by the lake in anticipation of sunrise. I looked around at the chaos and decided to retreat to lower elevation to find some more peace and quiet. I found it at a familiar scene from the first trip.
This time, I arrived before sunrise, and had the opportunity to catch some alpenglow on the peaks. As with the previous weekend, the lighting situation gave me quite a few headaches. Once again I used a hard-edge grad filter to keep the mountains from turning too bright.
Thanks again to a bit of AI-enabled editing in Lightroom, I managed to finetune the exposure to match what I saw with my eyes that morning. Heavy editing like this isn’t usually my first option, but in both instances I thought it worthwhile to save what would otherwise be a near impossible photo to capture on film (one of the few times I wished I had a digital camera!).
The rest of Bishop Creek Canyon looked even more vibrant than it did the previous weekend. More and more aspens were turning yellow. Visiting twice in the span of a week allowed me to see just how quickly the canyon had changed.
After snapping the pictures shown above, I descended the trail into the forest and found myself alongside Bishop Creek. Here the foliage was lush and green, a world away from the yellow and orange hues above me in the canyon.
After some more exploring, I eventually ran out of suitable scenes to photograph in Bishop Creek Canyon. With the rest of the day free, I decided to drive to Conway Summit, a mountain pass about eighty miles north of Bishop. The summit overlooks a set of rolling hills covered with patches of aspens. Experienced observers spoke highly of the fall color there. I had never visited the area in the fall and wanted to see it for myself.
Once I arrived, I stood on the side of the road with my camera and telephoto lens and waited for the sun to peek out from the clouds. Eventually they parted just enough to allow some light to illuminate the groves of aspens below us. I happily snapped away, confident that I had nailed the proper exposure.
When I received my film back, I was surprised to realize that my camera meter had misjudged the light. While my eyes perceived the scene to be relatively evenly lit, the sky in the background turned out way too bright. I tried a variety of editing tools in Adobe Lightroom to dial back the brightness, to no avail. I felt disappointed and resigned myself to waiting another year to try again, until I remembered that I had also photographed the scene on a second camera body, a Nikon FE2 loaded with Ektar 100.
Ektar, a color negative film, could theoretically handle the bright highlights much better than the slide film I used in the initial photos. However, even the shots on Ektar were initially too bright. It took another bit of editing in Adobe Lightroom to make the photo resemble what my eyes had seen.
I spent the next day meeting up with a friend for lunch in Bishop and did not photograph anything until late in the afternoon. As some thick clouds rolled into the Owens Valley, I thought that the overcast skies might provide some nice, even lighting—perfect for some intimate landscapes. I drove up to a trailhead situated almost 4,000 feet above the valley floor and started hiking along a rolling creek in search of some promising scenes.
I eventually found an outcrop that allowed me to see a cascade in the creek. I balanced myself and my tripod precariously on some boulders in the water and held my breath as I set up my camera for the shot.
I used a warming filter for this picture in order to mitigate the cooler tones that would have otherwise resulted from me using a slide film on an overcast day. The filter restored some of the vibrant colors I saw in person.
Eventually sunset drew nearer and I decided it was high time to turn around before it got too dark. On my way back to the car, I found another scene that looked compelling, and I couldn’t resist breaking out the tripod and camera again. I inched my way down a slope by the creek and contorted both my body and tripod in order to frame up the shot effectively.
I woke up the next morning with the realization that I didn’t have any picture in mind for sunrise. Overcast skies also precluded the chance of any strong alpenglow. Without the pressure of finding a subject to photograph, I drove around the outskirts of Bishop, looking around anything that caught my eye. Finally, I noticed some soft, pink light on the Sierra as the sun peeked up from the horizon. I worked through my mental list of potential angles and narrowed it down to one particular spot by the Owens River I had visited a year before, which afforded a wide view of the entire Sierra front range. I sped along the backroads until I arrived at my designated spot. I rushed out of the car, pulled out my tripod and camera, and then ran back and forth between one shore and another in search of a composition.
I tried a few different ones, but none of them seemed particularly noteworthy until the light changed yet again. The pink glow from sunrise had given way to some stronger, more direct light, but clouds covered the sun just enough to prevent the light from becoming too bright. That light shone on the entire Sierra front range. I rummaged through my camera bag for the right wide-angle lens, then mounted it onto the camera and pressed the shutter.
I really like this picture, so much so that I’ve selected it as the cover for my 2023 Portfolio Calendar. Unlike the first morning of the trip, I had the area entirely to myself. I also lucked out; in all my trips to the Sierra I’ve only seen clouds at sunrise on several occasions. The photo evokes the same sense of calm and stillness that I felt that morning.
That sunrise turned out to be a fitting final act to a hectic stretch of traveling: two weekend trips within the span of a week-and-a-half, with almost 1500 miles of driving. In exchange, I received some priceless memories, a new batch of portfolio-worthy pictures, and a bit of photographic wisdom I’ll use for next year’s trip.