Half Dome Light Trails from Clouds Rest 1
Trip timelapse video: vimeo.com/453073583
I haven't really posted to Flickr in a while, but I'm back. Last fall, for the first time in years, I finished editing my photo backlog. Then COVID hit, and all my travel plans were canceled. I was going to spend two weeks in Patagonia during their fall colors, I had two trips to Yosemite planned, a trip to Colorado... all were canceled. I stopped going on Flickr because it painfully reminded me of what I wanted to be doing but couldn't. Flickr became a depressing site.
Fast forward to summer, and I've started traveling and once again have an enormous backlog. I did two different backpacking trips to Yosemite, and I hiked over 100 miles of the Sierra High Route, an off-trail high-altitude alternative to the John Muir Trail.
A few months after my 2016 Half Dome light trail adventure, a Half Dome/hiking fanatic named Griff Joyce emailed my hiking partner Kurt Lawson and asked if we would photograph a group of Griff's friends hiking it four years in the future. I shrugged, assuming that plans would change. Shockingly, they didn't. Griff celebrated his 50th birthday by getting a group of 50 people to hike Half Dome, catch sunset on the top, and hike down at night. Kurt photographed it from our old spot on Mt. Watkins, I hiked four camera bodies up Clouds Rest and photographed it from there, and Matthew Saville hiked to the Cascade Cliffs (near Starr King) for a third angle.
I rented a 200mm f/2 and used it for this shot. A number of frames were stacked to produce this, and I also used them for timelapse video. That was an obnoxiously huge lens to backpack up the nearly-10,000 ft tall Clouds Rest, but the photos were worth it. My backpack weighed 55 lbs (25 kg), and the vast majority of that was camera gear.
A wider version of this photo can be viewed at www.flickr.com/photos/geekyrocketguy/50295351218/in/datep....
Half Dome Light Trails from Clouds Rest 1
Trip timelapse video: vimeo.com/453073583
I haven't really posted to Flickr in a while, but I'm back. Last fall, for the first time in years, I finished editing my photo backlog. Then COVID hit, and all my travel plans were canceled. I was going to spend two weeks in Patagonia during their fall colors, I had two trips to Yosemite planned, a trip to Colorado... all were canceled. I stopped going on Flickr because it painfully reminded me of what I wanted to be doing but couldn't. Flickr became a depressing site.
Fast forward to summer, and I've started traveling and once again have an enormous backlog. I did two different backpacking trips to Yosemite, and I hiked over 100 miles of the Sierra High Route, an off-trail high-altitude alternative to the John Muir Trail.
A few months after my 2016 Half Dome light trail adventure, a Half Dome/hiking fanatic named Griff Joyce emailed my hiking partner Kurt Lawson and asked if we would photograph a group of Griff's friends hiking it four years in the future. I shrugged, assuming that plans would change. Shockingly, they didn't. Griff celebrated his 50th birthday by getting a group of 50 people to hike Half Dome, catch sunset on the top, and hike down at night. Kurt photographed it from our old spot on Mt. Watkins, I hiked four camera bodies up Clouds Rest and photographed it from there, and Matthew Saville hiked to the Cascade Cliffs (near Starr King) for a third angle.
I rented a 200mm f/2 and used it for this shot. A number of frames were stacked to produce this, and I also used them for timelapse video. That was an obnoxiously huge lens to backpack up the nearly-10,000 ft tall Clouds Rest, but the photos were worth it. My backpack weighed 55 lbs (25 kg), and the vast majority of that was camera gear.
A wider version of this photo can be viewed at www.flickr.com/photos/geekyrocketguy/50295351218/in/datep....