Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park is among the most well-known viewpoints in the United States. Many thousands of photos have been captured from this iconic viewpoint, which overlooks the western end of Yosemite Valley. But I had never seen any photograph with a sunrise quite like the one I experienced in April 2017. I hoped that during April I could photograph the sun rising over the eastern end of Yosemite Valley opposite Tunnel View. On this particular morning, I got up well before dawn and drove to Tunnel View, where the sky was mostly a dark grey overcast and did not look promising. However, an opening in the clouds on the eastern horizon offered some hope.
As dawn approached, the sky brightened. Then light flowed through the opening and turned the overcast into rich purple and orange. Just before sunrise, a light pillar appeared over the eastern end of Yosemite Valley. The combination of purple and orange clouds and a light pillar was amazing, something I had never witnessed anywhere else, let alone at Tunnel View. I quickly took several series of photos of the scene when the colors were the most intense. I manually bracketed exposures since the foreground was considerably darker than the sky. During processing, I combined one exposure for the sky with a longer exposure of the foreground to create an exposure blend.
