Fresno Trip - Stage 2 Yosemite - Part 3 Tempting Fate

I almost wasn’t going to do this post.  It felt a bit like tempting fate.  You don’t want to mess around with the gods too much; you just might piss them off.  Ann and I are fortunate enough to meet some interesting people on our journeys but you’ll excuse me if I say I’ll pass on butting heads with a Cyclops, getting lured to my death by the Sirens, or having lunch with (ok, being lunch for . . .) a Hydra.  Let’s say that I like to keep my head low and not attract that kind of attention.  But sometimes I just can’t help myself.  (Isn’t that the way it always starts?)

Say the word “Yosemite” and any landscape photographer will immediately think Ansel Adams. Yes, Saint Ansel.  Yosemite is his cathedral and its hymns are in black and white.  I remember the first time I saw a copy of Yosemite and the Range of Light.  I was at the Weston Gallery in Carmel.  I’d read about it, how it was the first book to utilize the newest innovations in duotone technology (and had a price to match it - $75 in 1980’s dollars) and was heads and shoulders above any previous mass-produced book of photographs.  It was, it is, one of the finest photography books you can buy.  The images are simply stunning, and well printed.  No, they didn’t match the prints on the gallery wall, but for once you could see not only the massing and composition of an image, you could see the quality of light.  In a book!  So if there is a Mecca for photography, it is Yosemite (and Point Lobos is Medina).  

To say that making black and white images of Yosemite can be intimidating for a photographer is a bit of an understatement.  The bar for the quality of work is high.  Very high.  So how does one do it justice?

But whether it was Ansel’s genius, his ability not to ignore the obvious, or the fact that for so many years technology provided him with no other alternative, the mixture of light, granite and textures of Yosemite just begs to be photographed in black and white.  

So here are my some of my efforts from the few days we were there. Working on them made me realize that I am far from the days of feeling comfortable working in black and white. When Ansel’s The Negative and The Camera were my technical bibles, when I felt I had a real control over TRI-X sheet film processed in HC110 developer, and when I saw the world in B&W. I’m just learning how to see again and just barely starting to understand the tools I now have at my fingertips. At least they don’t smell like fixer anymore!  

There’s not much more I can say, so I’ll just leave you to the images.