A friend loaned me a signed copy of  Ansel Adams' "Yosemite and the Range of Light."   The book was full of his great black and white images taken in Yosemite Valley. It provoked me to go look at my Yosemite and Sierra Mountain images from a black and white perspective. So this post is totally devoted to black and white landscapes. I hope you enjoy!

If you enter Yosemite from the South, you go into a tunnel. As you exit it, you run smack into this  view. No Photographer, including Ansel Adams, or Adam Felde can ignore this shot ... 

This is a view from the Valley floor looking across the Merced river towards the North East.

Another view of the Valley as I left one afternoon:

On yet another trip, I took this view from the Merced river. The clouds that day were spectacular!

Alabama Hills 1\ 320s, at f\14 || E.Comp:-6 \ 6 || 12mm || WB: AUTO 0. || ISO: 200 || Tone: AUTO || Sharp: NORMAL || Camera: NIKON D2Xon: 2007:07:15 14:33:29

I've only visited Yosemite once when there was snow on the ground. In this photo there's a very light layer of fog sitting close to the ground. Do you see the duck in the image?

"Bruce, Look!" I said from the back seat of an F5 as we were winging our way North to Seattle. "There's Yosemite!" And, as quickly as I could say it, Bruce was on the radio with Air Traffic Control requesting a left, 360 degree turn. We were doing 500 MPH as he hung a steep, tight, 3G turn over the valley. I struggled to hold the camera up to window and clicked away. This was one of the good shots. Thank God for auto focus ... Half Dome from air:

On a different trip in the same plane, I took this image of the Sierras covered in snow:

And, a little later in that flight, this image of the western foothills North of Reno. There were fires burning in the area and a strong inversion layer. They created quite an interesting visual effect. The color version of this image is blue-toned from the thickness and color of the smoke.

And, of course, Mt St Helens was in our path so another, albeit less exciting, 360 degree turn seemed to be in order. Click!

Well,  that's it for my B&W retrospective look at a few of the images I've taken of the incredibly interesting range of mountains that run North and South along the West coast of the U.S.

I  hope you enjoyed them, and, as always, thank you for taking the time to look and comment.

Adam