Dean M. Chriss
Photography
Lone Pine Peak and Alabama Hills, Winter Storm, California
(Click image to enlarge)
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.