El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, California, USA

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    Not being blessed with the best weather in the world, I had to make due during my visit of Yosemite National Park in January 2010. The one thing that is, of course, so impressive in Yosemite Valley are the massive mountains just getting straight up, the most famous one arguably being El Capitan. This is really an amazing rock, but very hard to take good pictures of. There are some beautiful examples here on flickr.

    The difficult thing about El Capitan is that the rock is so massive. Tilting the camera is a must if you are close by, even with a tilt-shift lens, and doing panorama shots dwarfs the surroundings. An amazing picture that manages to combine everything can be seen in Galen Rowell's book "Moutain Light". By a smart composition, he managed to get away with a upwards tilted camera, without the convering lines of trees becoming weird. Add to that the wonderful light he got, and you end up with a beautiful picture.

    I am not Galen Rowell. :) Nor am I fan of just recreating pictures (a hard decision on whether or not posting my previous tunnel view picture, but as laid out there, the weather did it).

    So, what I tried to do here was to just hint at the sheer size of that rock, by putting it in perspective to known objects, trees, without showing El Capitan in full. A vertical composition, of course, and unfortunately not the light I would have liked.

    Camera again was my D300 with my Nikkor 16-85 lens, at 85 mm, aperture f5.6.

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