When I visited Yosemite before Christmas, it was on the tail of a big rain storm. Thus waterfalls were flowing as in early Spring but the light was still that of winter (i.e. good light on Yosemite Falls!) which meant: Good Photos
After shooting from Cook's meadow in the morning, we decided to hike the Upper Yosemite Falls trail (post lunch) and see up to where we can get. There was not much snow and we could reach the base of upper Yosemite Falls (after about 1300 feet of elevation gain) where I was greeted with a rainbow at the base of the falls. I made many photos of the waterfall and the rainbow, each time refining the composition but still was not satisfied. Then I hit upon the idea of including Half Dome in the image, framed by some tree branches in the foreground. Using my 16-35mm lens at 24mm, I could do that and the image immediately looked special in the viewfinder. At the bottom, I had more of the dark foreground but I counted on some snow spots to hold it together and also thought that it allowed the rainbow to stand out more.
Now I carefully placed the waterfall on the left on the image which was extended by the rainbow which in turn mimicked the Half Dome. After satisfied with the interaction of the curves in the image, I made this photo.
Post processing involved bringing out some shadow details along with routine raw file processing, mild sharpening and conversion to jpeg.
NIKON D700
1/100 second
F/11.0
ISO 100
23 mm (35mm equiv.)