Tunnel View stripped to tone, storm cloud filling the upper frame.
Yosemite Valley, California · March 2025
The place
If you have seen Yosemite Valley in a photograph, there is a fair chance the photographer was standing at the mouth of a road tunnel. The Wawona Tunnel — 4,233 feet bored through granite — opened on June 10, 1933, after nearly two years of work and about $850,000, replacing a steep, narrow stage road with something an automobile could manage. The overlook sits just past its eastern portal and took the tunnel’s name. From it you see the southwest face of El Capitan on the left, Half Dome on the axis, and Bridalveil Fall on the right.
The valley was protected long before the road arrived. On June 30, 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the bill granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California, on the condition that they be held, in the language of the act, for public use, resort, and recreation.
How it was made
Early March, 2025, after the sun had left the valley. The frame is one exposure: ninety-three seconds at f/4.5, ISO 100, 52mm, on a tripod.
At that length there is no hand-holding and no hurrying. The shutter stays open while the storm cloud moves and the granite does not, so the moving thing records as smoothed tone and the still thing stays hard-edged. Rendered in monochrome, the picture keeps what that light actually offered — weight, edge, gradient — and nothing it did not.
Light as an instrument
Something I keep circling back to: surgeons are increasingly operating by light.
Fluorescence-guided surgery gives a patient a dye that concentrates in particular tissue, then illuminates the surgical field so that tissue announces itself while the operation is under way. Indocyanine green has been approved since 1959 and in routine surgical use since roughly 2005. Pafolacianine, which binds the folate receptor, was approved by the FDA in November 2021 to help identify ovarian cancer lesions, and expanded in December 2022 to lung lesions.
In May the American College of Surgeons reported that the technique is moving past cancer — toward nerve visualization, burn assessment, perfusion in flaps and transplants, and confirming blood supply at a bowel anastomosis. An early-phase study of a nerve-highlighting agent in 38 men undergoing robotic prostatectomy reported workable dosing with few adverse events. These are findings reported by their investigators, not settled practice.
Still, the instinct is a familiar one. Point light carefully at a thing and it will show you its actual edges. It is more or less why I stand in the cold with a tripod at the end of the day.
Richard Abraham, MD
Healing Light Media
Sources
Wawona Tunnel and Tunnel View, Wikipedia and Wikipedia. Opening date, cost and construction: Sierra Sun Times. Yosemite Grant of June 30, 1864: Library of Congress. Pafolacianine approval: U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Fluorescence-guided surgery beyond oncology: American College of Surgeons Bulletin, May 2026.