geekyrocketguy's photostream  

After seeing a photo from this angle, I set out to locate the spot. I would absolutely kill to film night timelapse here, so I was scouting out the location.

Thank you, conveniently diagonal cloud bank. I dunno how I feel about the rest of the conversion, though.

Taken at 6 AM in 25* weather at Yosemite's tunnel view while waiting for a mediocre sunrise.

When I see this many people, I suddenly lose all interest in taking photos...

This horde lined the Merced River in Yosemite on Saturday night, all hoping to photograph the firefall down the face of El Capitan. Even though the mountains behind us were receiving light, clouds prevented the light from reaching El Cap, and the firefall didn't occur. Everyone left disappointed.

There were a few pullouts along Southside Drive, but these didn't fit more than a handful of cars. On both nights that I attempted to shoot the firefall, we ended up parking over half a mile away and schlepping our gear. As we walked out on Saturday night, the Park Service was ticketing the vehicles that had created their own parking spaces off the side of the road...

While shooting vertical panos with my 7D + 300mm, I used my Rebel XT + 70-300 for wider shots.

The Yosemite firefall only occurs for a week or two each year, and I've wanted to photograph it for a while. The firefall occurs when orange light from the sunset hits Horsetail Falls, a tiny waterfall down the face of El Capitan, at exactly the right angle. This year there's been very little precipitation, so it didn't seem like the firefall would happen. With a week to go until our Yosemite trip and Horsetail Falls completely dry, we cancelled our cabin reservations and began to plan an eastern sierras trip instead.

A snowstorm hit the valley a few days before the trip and Horsetail Falls began running again. We scrambled to reschedule the Yosemite trip and took whatever lodging we could find (unheated tent cabin in Camp Curry, yay!). We planned to photograph the firefalls for three nights.

On Saturday evening, it was partly cloudy. We joined the hordes of other photographers on the banks of the Merced River. The mountains behind us were catching light, but a cloud bank prevented El Cap from receiving the light that it needed to glow. The firefall didn't occur, and we returned, disappointed.

On Sunday, the clouds parted just before sunset and I was able to get this photo. I shot it with my 300mm f/2.8L on my 7D, which was simply way too much zoom. This image is a vertical panorama of four horizontal shots. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone else with a firefalls photo this high-resolution...

Monday started off totally clear, so I had high hopes for photographing the firefall again from a different and unique location. In the afternoon, however, the skies turned a uniform shade of gray as clouds covered everything. It seemed highly unlikely that the firefalls would occur, and I wanted to get back to Berkeley before 11 PM, so we gave up and drove back a bit early. Thus one night out of the three proved productive, which is pretty much how it goes with landscape photography.