Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Clouds Over Diablo
6 July 2022
The weather here has been uncharacteristically muggy this week. We've returned from our daily constitutional drenched in sweat.
Diablo. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 42mm (84mm equivalent), f11, 1/640 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
But the upside is we've had some unusual clouds. As we walked between Twin Peaks and Mount Davidson yesterday, we spied Mount Diablo to the east with a particularly spectacular display of them. Dark ones floating in front of white ones, all piled up on top of each other to mimic the landscape below them.
We were wearing polarized sunglasses so they looked even more defined. We raised our camera to line up the shot but when we lifted our glasses out of the way to look through the EVF, we were a little disappointed. The drama was missing.
We're not big fans of simulating a polarized effect in post processing. We really don't think it quite works.
And we don't have a circular polarizing filter for the Olympus lens we were using.
But did that stop us? No, not at all.
We simply shot through one lens of our sunglasses to polarize the capture.
Mount Diablo is the blue triangular geological fixture in the middle of the frame. It's 30 miles to the east of San Francisco, a bit more from where we were standing.
At 3,849 feet it isn't the tallest peak in the world but because it sits on a plain, it has unobstructed views to the Farallones 50 miles to the west, the Sierra Nevadas across the Central Valley to the east, Lassen Peak 181 miles north and Sentinel Dome in Yosemite to the south.
It rose from the plain because it sits between converging earthquake faults that cause it to continually rise three to five millimeters every year. That's 0.12 to 0.20 inches a year, or about a foot in one's lifetime.
It has posed for photographs by Ansel Adams, Cleet Carlton, Alfred A. Hart, Scott Hein, Stephen Joseph, Don Paulson, Brad Perks, Robert Picker, Richard Rollins, David Sanger, Michael Sewell and Bob Walker, among many others.
And yesterday it posed for us wearing some pretty clouds.