Jumbleland
Faulted, uplifted, fractured, eroded and tumbled down, the Alabama Hills provide quite a compelling landscape accented with warm dawn light at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, near Lone Pine, California.
Josh and I drove over to the Alabama Hills the day before this shot was taken only to find the area fairly socked in with textureless clouds, and with a larger and unfortunately visually uninteresting storm bearing down as the day progressed. We used that time to scout around a fair bit, marveling at the jumbled rocky landscape and imagining how grand the scene could be if the clouds parted in the morning to reveal sunrise light on the great mountains rising behind this interesting foreground.
And during those scouting efforts over the wider area around Lone Pine, I have to admit we almost got our not-nearly-high-enough clearance rental vehicle seriously hung up on a rocky dirt road a good ways higher in the foothills above Manazar that afternoon as the whipping wind signaled the storms' arrival. But that's a story for another day, or perhaps not at all, since it reveals some less than stellar decision making on our part given the obvious limitations of the vehicle we had (wouldn't have been any problem at all with a high-clearance 4WD of course). Funny thing is that, since we didn't end up wrecking the thing, we'll probably end up remembering wrestling with that one stretch of road longer than most anything else from our trip this past winter.
Anyway, nature steered our focus in another direction for a while the next morning at sunrise as an unrelenting series of cloud patches moved in from the north, each advancing and passing very quickly, but still on the whole obscuring the Sierra peaks during most of the best sunrise light. An impediment can just as well be inspiration for a different approach, however, so we shifted much of our attention to using the Alabama Hills as the primary scene element rather than foreground for images highlighting the jagged forms of the Sierra ridges and peaks beyond.
When I took this shot, that torrent of fast moving cloud banks had wholly obscured everything above the top of the frame here, but I thought it was beautiful how vibrant sunrise light darted under the clouds for a few moments here to alight on some of the Alabama Hills' interesting features and the lower slopes and crags of the mountains beyond.
Thanks for viewing!
Jumbleland
Faulted, uplifted, fractured, eroded and tumbled down, the Alabama Hills provide quite a compelling landscape accented with warm dawn light at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, near Lone Pine, California.
Josh and I drove over to the Alabama Hills the day before this shot was taken only to find the area fairly socked in with textureless clouds, and with a larger and unfortunately visually uninteresting storm bearing down as the day progressed. We used that time to scout around a fair bit, marveling at the jumbled rocky landscape and imagining how grand the scene could be if the clouds parted in the morning to reveal sunrise light on the great mountains rising behind this interesting foreground.
And during those scouting efforts over the wider area around Lone Pine, I have to admit we almost got our not-nearly-high-enough clearance rental vehicle seriously hung up on a rocky dirt road a good ways higher in the foothills above Manazar that afternoon as the whipping wind signaled the storms' arrival. But that's a story for another day, or perhaps not at all, since it reveals some less than stellar decision making on our part given the obvious limitations of the vehicle we had (wouldn't have been any problem at all with a high-clearance 4WD of course). Funny thing is that, since we didn't end up wrecking the thing, we'll probably end up remembering wrestling with that one stretch of road longer than most anything else from our trip this past winter.
Anyway, nature steered our focus in another direction for a while the next morning at sunrise as an unrelenting series of cloud patches moved in from the north, each advancing and passing very quickly, but still on the whole obscuring the Sierra peaks during most of the best sunrise light. An impediment can just as well be inspiration for a different approach, however, so we shifted much of our attention to using the Alabama Hills as the primary scene element rather than foreground for images highlighting the jagged forms of the Sierra ridges and peaks beyond.
When I took this shot, that torrent of fast moving cloud banks had wholly obscured everything above the top of the frame here, but I thought it was beautiful how vibrant sunrise light darted under the clouds for a few moments here to alight on some of the Alabama Hills' interesting features and the lower slopes and crags of the mountains beyond.
Thanks for viewing!