Photography Advantures-Yosemite National Park

Armed with heavy, field artillery (a Japanese Cannon 5D Mark II mounted with a beast of a muzzle, a TS-E 17mm caliber angle of fire @f4L; ) I make a stop at the most shot-to-death scene since the invention of the camera to Ansel Adams called “The Tunnel View”, an puzzling name cause it’s not clear whether the ‘ view’ named for being located next to an actual tunnel,(I’m sure it’s the latter, considering the genius who coined this name was not a photographer) or for the scene’s having a deep, U- shaped valley with Merced river leading the eye to the region’s dramatic geologic icons El Capitan (left) and Half Dome (middle), and dazzling Yosemite Falls (though, not a bit dazzling from where I’m standing), and as I’m setting my gear a woman whose friends are your usual suspects Harley Dudes, says, “Quite a gear you got here”, pleased with her noticing my bank-account-breaker Pro gear, I reply nonchalantly, looking through the viewfinder, manually searching for the ‘sweet-spot, “Yep, that’s the only way to do it. I always go for the kill”. With one eye glued to the viewfinder and with the other glued to her not-so-bad-in-painfully-tight-jeans butt, I watch her walk down the rocks, while one of the Harley Dudes, holding a Point & Shoot camera, fires his portrait shot of his Harley Dudes friends, blowing up a million pixels in the sky and around the back-lit heads of the Dudes while under-exposing another million pixels or so in their faces, turning them into a coal-mine workers’ faces, which is another insult and damage to the Dudes who think highly of themselves, and will only be noticed when viewed again on a bigger screen, each of them yelling, “Dude, where is my face?” or maybe not. Instead, being a total ignorant about photography, all of them rejoice at the miserable image and pour praises on the shooter, “Great shot, dude!”, buying him a pint of Budweiser. Who says the unskilled is not being awarded in this world? Now, locating my honey coated “Sweet-Spot”, In AV mode, I depress the shutter release button on the Cannon, launching a three bracketed projectiles with different power (shutter speed) @ EV 0, -2, +2, hitting the target with crisp sharpness from front to infinity…in this shot, infinity ends at the peak of Half Dome. Beyond that is left for the imagination…