Lone Pine Peak and Alabama Hills, Winter Storm, California

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In this photograph Lone Pine Peak is being enveloped by the backlit clouds of a winter storm. The clouds obscure the bright sun, giving them a luminous quality. They also help to define the mountain with shadows just before obscuring it. The enormous mountain is seen behind rounded and rough surfaced monzogranite boulders of the Alabama Hills. These were initially formed underground from cooled magma and then exposed and shaped by wind and water erosion. The Sierra Nevada Mountains behind them were formed in a geologic instant by plate tectonic activity of the earth's crust and glacial erosion.

I captured this photograph on film in the middle 1980s. Since then the world's population has grown by 3 billion. That's an amount equal to the entire current population of the world's three most populous countries, China, India, and the United States. The world's population is increasing even faster today. There are about 140,000 more people now than there were 24 hours ago.