Working for a large, global company means coordinating across time zones near and far. I work with people and teams across the United States and many countries in Europe, Australia, and the Far East. If I’m lucky, 7 or 8 a.m. covers Europe, and 2-4 p.m. often covers Australia. However, I’m often not lucky, which means 6 a.m. calls to Europe and evening calls to Australia.

Today was one of those unlucky days. I started my day at 5:45 AM and joined the conference call at 6:00. It was dark outside, and cold surrounded the house. It’s been a wet and mild winter this year. However, today was supposed to be sunny.

One call turned into another call, which, of course, turned into more calls. Before I knew it, it was noon, with blue skies with clouds dotted across the horizon. With a bluebird sky appearing after many soggy days, my mind quickly wandered. One of the things on my bucket list was to see the Firefalls at Yosemite National Park. Every mid to late February, Horsetail Falls appears to turn into lava with a confluence of a couple of critical factors:

• the sun moves into exactly the right position in the sky which occurs mid to late February
• we have a good, snowy winter to generate plenty of water storage
• the temperatures warm slightly to start melting snow
• the sky is clear to provide sunlight, obviously

I purchased a new camera over the holidays. After my last camera went to somebody who decided they forcibly needed it more than I did, I took three years off of using a traditional SLR camera. My iPhone captured life’s adventures. Over time, I realized that while the iPhone takes fantastic photos using computational photography, the photos are rich, but the pixels are poor. The photos look great, but they don’t have the detail and richness of photos taken with an SLR camera.

In life, there is always a reason to avoid going on an adventure. I’m too busy.  I’m needed here.  What about this thing?  Sometimes, we have to have our “F it” moment.  As I looked up information on the Internet, it appears that mid to late February requires reservations to get inside the park on the weekends. If I went during the week, I didn’t need a reservation. Score! So at 1 o’clock, I said, “F it, I’m going!” I could take my last phone call from the day in the truck driving across California. I grabbed my camera, some winter gear, and a few snacks and was on my way! Remember those sunny skies? Clear skies bring about colder mornings as the clouds keep the heat in the atmosphere, so it was going to be a brisk day in the bay and a cold night in the mountains.

Driving across California today was genuinely fantastic. The mild, wet winter set the stage for an excellent early spring. The hills were green, the trees were blossoming, and the landscape was filled with color. The Bay Area quickly faded into the rearview mirror as the Sacramento Valley opened up ahead of me.

Another 90 minutes passed, and the Sacramento Valley yielded to the Sierras. The snowpack was definitely low this year, and the mountain peaks didn’t have a thick coating of white snow. As I got closer to the park, traffic started to show up. This is not good. The drive into Yosemite Valley quickly began to feel like a weekend in the summer—not a weekday in the dead of winter. 

Once in Yosemite Valley in earnest, I couldn’t deny that this was a significant event that tens of thousands of people came to see. All of the parking anywhere remotely close to the waterfall was gone. All of the roadside parking was marked off. As I was driving around the valley floor, I saw thousands of people, equal numbers of cameras, and hundreds of cars jamming up every available parking space. Photographing this event was not for the faint of heart.

At 4:45 p.m., I found a space way off in the distance. I had a rough sense of where I was supposed to go, but only about an hour of sunlight remained. I followed the crowds, hoping I’d get to the right place. As I walked, I took some casual snapshots of Yosemite Valley to try out the new camera. I didn’t think much about my photos, as I was more focused on getting to a place I could set up to photograph the Firefalls.

Shortly after 5 o’clock, I found an area with some space to set up my camera. It was more of a frontal view of the waterfalls, not the profile view that makes the prolific photograph. The remaining sunlight was quickly disappearing, so I made a compromise to stay here. 

As I began to photograph, the strengths of the iPhone quickly came to the surface. I switched between my iPhone and my SLR camera often throughout the evening. I just pointed the camera with the iPhone and pressed the shutter button. I had to think about exposure, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO with the SLR camera. Every photograph was a reminder of the fundamentals of photography.  Since this was a perspective of the Firefalls I wasn’t expecting, I struggled with the composition quite a bit. Do I zoom in close? Do I take a wider view of the scene, including trees and more of the surrounding landscape?  This question haunted me for the entire shoot.

The four main compositions I used to capture the Firefalls. The last one was “shot on an iPhone.”

Additionally, how do I do auto-exposure bracketing? While the same manufacturer made my new camera as my old camera, the menus were completely different. I couldn’t find the feature that took the same photograph at different exposure levels. Cell service was nonexistent since I was in Yosemite Valley with thousands of other people so I couldn’t look online. Oh, the joys of adventure!

The setting sun brought yellows, oranges, and reds all across the sky and the mountains. Despite all the difficulties around getting here, It was a sight to see and lots of lessons learned! When the sun disappeared, cold and darkness quickly filled the valley. I didn’t account for how quickly light would disappear. My truck was more than a mile away. Fortunately, I was walking with plenty of people, even that distance.

I planned to stay in a hotel near the park, but my Friday was filled with even more meetings. It made sense to return to the Bay Area tonight, sleep in my own bed, and enjoy an 8 a.m. conference call at home. I stopped by the hotel to let the front desk know I wouldn’t be checking in. At first, he didn’t understand why I told him I wasn’t checking in. After a couple of exchanges, I told him I didn’t want him to stay at the front desk waiting for somebody who wouldn’t check in and that I wasn’t asking for a refund. I was trying to be a good human. Once we really understood each other, he simply cancelled my reservation and ask I come back another time. He was truly kind and gracious.

When I got home, working with the photographs in Lightroom was much more challenging than I expected. All my pains around composing the right photo instantly appeared on the screen. I also longed for the ease of auto-exposure bracketing for this type of photograph. I couldn’t help but feel a little defeated—a lot of this experience was hard in surprising ways, and it pointed out that I have a lot to (re)learn in photography.

However, as I put the mouse on the screen, the photos started to come alive. I loved the photographs I took of the valley walking over to the Firefalls. I had put so little effort into those photographs, but they were the ones I loved most! I had reflections of beautiful scenery captured in standing water. The skies, the gently snow-dusted mountains, and the fallen trees on the ground all worked well together.

I also started to explore the color manipulation features in Lightroom. Some of the mid-range sliders brought out the color of the waterfall. Since I had a front view rather than a profile view, the color across the mountains was significantly diminished and had to be gently brought to life rather than having a solid stance.

Using RAW format on a true SLR again provided such details inside Lightroom. I forgot how much I missed working with so much data to develop a great photograph. One of the other key learnings is to bring an SLR camera when you’re going to photograph; it’s too heavy and complicated for snapshots, as the iPhone is a capable camera on its own.

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