A Photograph From the Archives: My Self-Critique

Wildflowers, Tuolumne Meadows, 1986

It’s wildflower season in the Yosemite high country, which made me think about this image that I made 25 years ago, in August of 1986, in Tuolumne Meadows.

In the 1980s large swaths of Lemmon’s paintbrush and shooting stars were common in Tuolumne Meadows in the summer. But 1986 brought the best bloom I’ve ever seen there, with this great mix of paintbrush, little elephant’s heads, lupine, shooting stars, penstemons, and… that yellow flower (arrowhead butterweed?). For some reason though wildflowers have diminished in Tuolumne Meadows in recent years, and those great blooms seem to be a thing of the past.

In the summer of 1986 I was working at The Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley. On the day I made this photograph I drove up to the high country after work. A thunderstorm had rolled through, leaving the meadows wet and the skies overcast. But just before sunset the sun crawled underneath the clouds and lit up the peaks in the distance.

I actually think I did a pretty good job with the composition here. I needed to find some kind of structure or design to hold the foreground together and lead the viewer’s eyes into the distance. The little V- shaped group of flowers at the bottom of the frame accomplished both those things, giving the foreground some structure and leading viewer’s eyes toward the background. As a bonus, that V-shape mirrors the upside down Vs of the peaks.

The horizon line is high, but I think that’s appropriate here: the foreground is much more interesting than the sky. I’m glad I wasn’t overly concerned about putting the horizon a third of the way from the top.

This photograph was made with an Olympus OM-1, 28mm lens, and Kodachrome 64 film. I don’t remember the shutter speed, but I do remember that I stopped the aperture all the way down to f/22. Although you may not be able to tell at this size, the background is not perfectly sharp. The depth of field was pretty extreme (the closest flowers were only three feet from the camera), so it was hard to get everything in focus, but I wish I’d focused slightly further back and kept the peaks sharp—although if I had to pick one or the other, I’d rather have a soft background than a fuzzy foreground.

What else would I do differently? Well, I wish I’d had better equipment and materials! Kodachrome film didn’t render greens very well, and despite my efforts in Photoshop to coax some life into the greens of this drum-scanned transparency, they still have a dull, bluish cast to them. A warming filter would also have helped, but I had only started taking photography seriously about a year earlier, and didn’t know about warming filters yet. Nowadays of course, with a digital camera, I could just adjust the white balance.

That cyan sky is also a Kodachrome artifact that’s difficult to correct. A graduated neutral-density filter would have helped to darken the sky, though I was able to bring it down in Photoshop a bit. Again, I would do it differently with a digital camera these days, and either simply darken that sky in Lightroom or Photoshop, or blend two different exposures together.

Despite the flaws though, I’m happy with the composition, and I’m glad I have this photograph to remind me of that spectacular wildflower display.

So go ahead—this is your chance to critique one of my photos! What do you think of the composition? What would you have done differently?

—Michael Frye

Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He is the author and photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters, plus the eBook Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom. He has written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and his images have been published in over thirty countries around the world. Michael has lived either in or near Yosemite National Park since 1983, currently residing just outside the park in Mariposa, California.