Photo Wednesday: Yosemite Fern Spring
When you look at the photography of Yosemite National Park, I think at some point Fern Spring becomes almost a rite of passage. So many photographers end up there and show off pictures. In 2019 I was feeling really worn down and needed a break, so I took a few days off and stayed at the Yosemite Lodge to relax and experiment a bit. I set one specific restriction: No Epic Landscapes.
In practice, I needed have bothered. I went there in March, after winter and the snows had left, before spring sprung, so the park in general was a brown gloopy mess. On top of that, they were burning snag piles — all of the wood collected from winter tree repair and general tree trimming activities. Because of this, the valley floor was really smokey, and by the way, did I mention that it was cloudly and sunny?
In other words, perfect conditions for taking trophy winning images of Yosemite.
But that was okay — I mean, it’s Yosemite. I ended up choosing two places to photograph. One was Cascade Falls, which is on 120 on the way to Crane Flat out the park. A bridge crosses in front of the falls, and there’s usually a gaggle of photographers taking photos there. Including me. I’ve shot there a number of times and there are interesting things you can do with it if you think through your compositions (but we’ll talk about that some later date).
And having never photographed Fern Spring before, I felt it was time to try. I had tried in the past, two or three times, and always passed by because it seemed there was always a photographer or more already there and staked out on a composition.
Luck was with me, and nobody was at the spring, so I stopped and parked, pulled out my gear, and started considering compositions.
Here’s the thing: Fern Spring is tiny. It’s maybe 6 feet across, and it’s basically a puddle of water with an artesian spring flowing into it. The waterfalls in the picture above? Maybe four inches tall. It is both very difficult and quite interesting photographically.
In case it’s not obvious, I was doing a lot of experimenting with ND filters and really slow shutter speeds (in fact, when it makes sense, I still am; it’s lots of fun). I wanted a shot that didn’t look like all of the millions of shots of Fern Spring on Flickr, so I decided to go slow shutter. I also decided I wanted to try to remove all scale from the image; I didn’t want you to be able to tell how big or small this thing was by looking at the photo.
I think I mostly succeeded at that. Some might argue I left the shutter open too long, but I tried exposures from about 1/15 to over two minutes, and this one, at 50 seconds, was the one I liked the best. I think it effectively abstracts the water pools. Fern Spring is shaded by many trees, so you’re not going to get magic sunlight on the spot, either.
An amusing sub-story about this stop: I had also told myself this was not a bird photography trip, it was a landscape trip. Never tempt the gods like this, because what they did was send a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers to pound away on the trees around the spring, which I was studiously trying to ignore, but bird photography me kept yelling PILEATED as landscape me as I was trying to sort out the composition, adding to the fun and confusion.
In the end, I stuck with the landscape shot, and this was my favorite of the variations I tried. It feels a bit surreal and magical to me, which is nice, especially since the location itself is rather — honestly — pedestrian to look at in real life. But even in the plain, you can find magic when you try.
Gear Notes: Fuji X-T3, 16-55 at 55mm, 40 seconds at F/22, ISO 640, with ND filters not recorded (but probably at least 6 stops)
