BLACK OAK LEAVES, EL CAPITAN MEADOW, YOSEMTIE VALLEY 1983

John and I have been working on my next ebook, which is a collection of my Yosemite photographs.  This image is one of my favorite Yosemite images, but it has sadly languished in terms of printing it because the original film was lost about twenty years ago.  The Cibachrome lab I used lost it.  I never had a proper scan made of the film as high res film scanning was not commonly available back then.   And don’t get me started on “lost film” stories.  I have far too many…

However, I have an exhibit coming up this summer at The Ansel Adams Gallery from  7/07 to 8/17/2010 so this will be a golden opportunity to print and exhibit this image.  For the digital file shown here, I scanned an 8×10 Cibachrome.  Not an ideal method, but I can make a very clean 16×20 print from that file.

By the way, this photograph was made with my Wista 4×5 Metal Field Camera in January, 1983.

In my Yosemite: The Promise of Wildness book, I included this photo and wrote these words about the making of it:

“This young oak stands a few feet from the main road leaving Yosemite Valley.  Millions of visitors race by it each year.  Despite its incongruous location, the tree conveyed a sense of wildness to me.  I had had a bad day at work [The Ansel Adams Gallery] and was heading home.  Needing something to calm my frustrated disposition,  I stopped for a walk along the meadow’s edge.  Having had the time to slow down and relax, I looked up from my ruminations and was struck with the beauty of these leaves.  With my attitude adjustment complete, I exposed my favorite image of Yosemite!”

Enjoy,  Bill

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