Yosemite with Mya & Will
Yosemite National Park In California is hands down my favorite place on earth to visit. My love for the park is just short of the love I feel for my own family. The moments I’ve entered into the valley through Wawona Tunnel and scenes of patchy fog, cumulus clouds, or just the most dynamic light from the sun rising over the Sierras has almost brought me to tears numerous times. The awe and wonder it hits me with is addicting to say the least.
I try to picture myself in the valley during the last ice age when it was being carved deeper and deeper by massive glaciers. Or I think about earth millions of years ago, forming its crust that then became the granite that now surrounds you as you walk along the valley floor. What it must have been like to be the first human to walk over that last mountain as you then see the valley for the first time? One can only imagine and I try each time I stand in Yosemite’s majesty….
Mya and Will, with their deep spirituality, I know feel very similar to me as they gaze out into the park and that’s why they couldn’t let the opportunity pass them by to have their Elopement photos taken here. I felt so honored that they asked me to be their photographer, although I have been to Yosemite dozens of times this was my first time photographing a client.
After contacting me, they planned to get married as soon as possible. I knew we needed to obtain permits to photograph a wedding elopement in Yosemite, so I went right to work to figure out our timeline. You need to submit a permit at least 21 days before the wedding/photoshoot day. So, we decided on early March as our timeframe and paid our $150 for the permit. Planning an elopement in March in Yosemite can be a roll of the dice in terms of weather. It’s not uncommon to get snow, lightning and thunder stores or just very cold winds. Mya and Will, being very outdoorsy type people, were willing to bear the brunt of whatever Yosemite decided to throw at them and so was I! That being said, we got very lucky. Although the daytime temperatures nearly hit 44 degrees, it was clear, sunny and there was no wind.
The morning of the shoot I walked the valley floor looking for our best options for locations to photograph. The tall granite cliffs can obscure the sun at odd times of day, so an essential tool for this is an app called Sun Seeker. Using GPS, it shows me the path of the sun and where it will be throughout the day, wherever I am at in the park. This allows me to “pre-visualize” the shots, as one famous photographer of the Yosemite Valley, Ansel Adams, has said. Driving through the valley I saw some areas that were less appealing due to fire, flat brown grass, or Oak and Maple trees that have yet to bare their leaves. I decided on 3 different locations, that looked stunning and I’m sure that the photos they yielded will one day be passed down to their children.
In hopes to shoot more elopements and weddings in Yosemite I’m offering a 10% discount on my Yosemite packages when you mention this blog post for the rest of 2022! Contact me now to start planning the wedding of your dreams!
