Mono Lake is one of the most famous California nature photography sites, that fame is a consequence of both it’s photographic and environmental history. Environmentally it supports the second largest population of California gulls (the first, paradoxically, being in Utah), that support was threatened by the diversion of streams that provide water to the late for use by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 300 miles away. Photographically, tufa, the strange limestone formations exposed by the lowering lake level, the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada to the west, and the gull population provide a rich source of photographic opportunities.  In this post, I hope to excite you (just a little bit) about the area, and suggest a few places you might want to begin your photographic exploration of the area.

The most frequented area of the lake is the “South Tufa Area”, located along the south side of the lake.  While often a busy and well-frequented area, the number, size and variety of the tufa formations there are  unparalleled.  Your biggest challenge many times of year will be other photographers, but the area is large and gets interesting light both at sunrise (both toward the Sun and toward the Sierra) and just past suns, when the geography and elevation often provide strong, saturated earth shadows such as the one in the image I’ve included above.

A second location is what’s referred to as the “Old Marina” area, accessed from highway 395 just north of the  Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area Visitor Center.  This area does not contain the dramatic tall tufa of the South Tufa area, but the numerous formations in water provide interesting opportunities and challenges for sunrise silhouettes, and post-sunset earth shadows again are often very strong here. Because this area provides the most direct scenics looking directly east, it offers opportunities for shooting directly into the rising sun, or toward the rising moon.

A great area “off the beaten track” is found just east of Black Point along the north side of the lake. From highway 395, take Cemetery Road east past the cemetary, it becomes a dirt wide graded dirt road. After passing the tall hill that is black point, a thinner brach of the road heads back south towards the lakeshore and ends in a small parking area, from there it’s a simple 10-minute walk down to the lake shore near Negit and Paoha Islands. Again, smaller formations in water dominate here, and my best experiences in the area have been before, during and after sunset.

Most of these areas are available save for intermittent periods during the winter. While access can be limited in parts of winter, the combination of the strange formations and winter snow can be quite powerful. Fall is also popular, with good reason (there are a few lovely areas of aspen near the lake), but far more crowded for the photographically minded.

For bird photographers, gulls arrive in number in June, their chicks hatching in June on the islands inside the lake, and increase in numbers probably through August, only to by the end of September. While there’s a fair number of gulls along the shore, canoe tours after breeding season is over provide access to greater numbers of birds. Eared grebes are an August-early November opportunity. Avocets in breeding plumage are common in March and April.

Do stop by the Mono Lake Committee’s visitor center in Lee Vining as well, they can provide excellent information on current birding, flower and road conditions. They also offer photographic workshops (that attract beginners through pros), and they often have a photographic exhibit from the area as well.

The meat of this book is Adams’ nature images, well over one hundred, reproduced beautifully. I’ve seen his fine art prints in exhibitions and on display in the Eastern Sierra, and the images I know and love well, “Lake and Cliffs, Sierra Nevada” , “Tenaya Lake, Mount Conness”, ” Clearing Winter Storm”, each of these images is well-enough reproduced to trigger that gasp and that recognition I felt when seeing the prints the same time. I’ve read other reviews of the book that argue the quality of the printing, and I wonder at times if the writers have seen the particular prints they refer to, certainly some Adams’ early images in particular are low contrast, and the book in my hands is a fair reproduction of the few prints I’ve seen from that era.

The selection of images is strong, including not only Adams’ most famous work but often pairs of images taken from the same vantage point, or, in the case of a few images (most notably “Aspens, Northern New Mexico”), Szarkowski gifts us with reproductions of multiple prints of the same image, printed at different times in Adams’ career, in order to document, in small part, how Adams’ printing style evolved over time. Rare and early images are included in the collection and provide an additional sense of Adams’ evolution as an artist, but there is very much a focus on Adams’ nature images.

Szarkowski is equally successful with his biographical portrait, which makes up the first forty pages or so of the book, weaving together changes in his life and influences with changes in his images and technique. The author brings to bear an impressive understanding of the art history matched only by his impressive vocabulary, a combination which occasionally makes “At 100” dense (but never unpleasant) reading.

Are there lessons here for the modern photographer? I believe so. Of course, there are the images, and a simple page-by-page perusing of the images will demonstrate just how amazing a well-composed, well-directed fine black and white image can appear. But there are other lessons here as well.

I was particularly struck by the evolution of Adams’ work over time, and how that evolution played out not only in different negatives, but also how it played out on different interpretations of the same score. Every couple of years I have the experience of looking back and finding that the way I think about images has changed, I will go back and reinterpret my “digital negatives” as time progresses. While there are certainly moments in which this simply represents a clear, upward evolution of my own photographic technique, there are also times where it represents a more subjective change as well, and Szarkowski’s tome reminds me that this is not necessarily a failing or a lack of consistent personal vision.

I’ll briefly add that ::amazon(“0821225154”, “Ansel Adams at 100”):: is beautifully bound and slipcovered, and includes a 13×11 tritone reproduction print of “Aspens, Dawn, Dolores River Canyon”. It’s a beautiful book, and one I’m grateful to include in my own collection.