I’m still trying to follow an informal house rule about not posting too many photos of family to social media that developed as a response to my then-teenaged daughter’s sudden aversion to being photographed. But I do have a few photos from when my daughter was more willing to let me practice on her that I just love as photography. (It helps that I also love the subject herself, of course.) She was very patient, for example, with my early attempts to learn how to do lighting with portraiture, which I kind of gave up on after her patience disappeared due to my sudden lack of a photogenic subject.
Anyway, while last week’s sunset photo feels kind of ordinary to me now, almost embarrassingly so (considering that I showed it at the time to friends like I was the new Ansel Adams or something), this photo still feels like some pretty fine work.
I’ve done only a teeny bit of post-processing on the saturation here. It was a blazingly sunny day in early summer in Yosemite Valley, with a big snowpack melting off at very rapid rates (parts of the valley were in fact flooded). So the Merced River was raging with that deep icy green and we sat down to watch it for a minute. (Partly so we could ignore the ridiculous, offensive traffic jam on the road behind us.)
My daughter’s hair still catches light in the most amazing ways even now but this was one of the most astonishing moments of that tendency.
Love this one!
I have this photo hanging in my office and it gets admiring comments all the time.