Hana and Don climbed up to the Diving Board, a prominent feature just off the west shoulder of Half Dome. The spot is famous as the location from where Ansel Adams took “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome” in 1927 – it gives a phenomenal view of the face, plus the ability to lean out and look down a 1400 foot drop.
The route starts up past Vernal Falls, then veers off trail up the drainage to the left of Liberty Cap, jogs to the left of Half Dome, passes through lots of brush before finishing up next to Half Dome’s Northwest face. The round trip hike was about 14 miles, with 4000 feet of vertical.
We had the area nearly to ourselves once we left the Mist Trail above Vernal Falls, encountering five people in 8 hours. Three of them were Spanish tourists, giving Hana the chance to exhibit her fluency. We also came across a young bear (~150 lbs) ambling along just below Half Dome.
There’s one extreme time-lapse photo pair in the set – Hana standing at the Top of Vernal Falls in 1995 and in 2010)
These pictures are a little soft. We took two lenses: a 28-135mm consumer grade zoom and a 24mm tilt-shift lens. The latter is interesting: it allows the relationship between the lens plane and the image plane to be adjusted, correcting for perspective and canting the plane of focus. The view camera that Ansel Adams used provided the same effect (but weighed 10 times as much- hard to imagine how he carried it up to Diving Board in the dead of winter). The picture of Hana and Don with Half Dome in the background was taken with the Tilt-Shift.