Ahwahnee Meadow Treeline

On a frozen dawn at Ahwahnee Meadow, morning mist softens the treeline along the meadow's northern edge into a gradation of gray and pale green, Half Dome visible as a dark mass through the haze at the far end of the valley. The Leica M11 — a camera with no mirror, no vibration, no mechanism to blur a delicate exposure — was the right tool for this image: handheld at dawn, capturing the mist before it burned off in the first hour of warming. The meadow itself is a relic of the valley's prehistoric lake system, the soil too wet for trees, which is why it opens the valley's middle distance and provides the foreground that makes Yosemite compositions possible. The mist was gone by eight in the morning.