Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Grove Near Conway Summit

3 Comments
Aspen Grove Near Conway Summit

Aspen Grove Near Conway Summit. Sierra Nevada, California. September 27, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Newly fallen leaves litter the ground among softly lit trunks of aspen trees in a grove near Conway Summit in the eastern Sierra Nevada, California.

During my one hour (!) of fall aspen photography in the eastern Sierra on Sunday, I spent most of the time in one small grove of trees up the road to Virginia Lake from highway 395 at Conway Summit just north of Lee Vining. If you leave 395 and head up the road to Virginia Lakes, this is the first grove you encounter on your left – not far up the road and at a point where a small dirt road heads off from the main paved road.

I’ve photographed this grove before, but frequently I’ve arrived a bit after the peak. If anything, on this visit I was possibly a few days early. There were still a good number of green leaves in the grove, and across the road another large grove was completely green. However, here there were some great colors ranging from green to red and orange and yellow. I wandered up the hill through the grove and came to this spot where the ground was relatively clear but partially littered with fallen leaves, and a clear view of the many interesting shapes of the tree trunks was available.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

G Dan Mitchell: Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email


All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

3 thoughts on “Aspen Grove Near Conway Summit”

  2. Hi, Mark – thanks for dropping my and leaving a comment!

    I agree with your observation about creating compositions from such groves being difficult. I’ve also thought about this a bit – both about the difficulties and about what I was thinking about when I did this one.

    First, some of the difficulties:

    • Lighting is often very tough – some areas can be in deep shade while others may be illuminated by direct sun, and the reflective surfaces of leaves can make it hard to control highlights.
    • The dense growth in these areas can make it hard to get a clear shot of a composition that you do find – there might be a branch or tall grass in the foreground.
    • There are so many elements of the scene that it can be easy to miss some unfortunate gap or juxtaposition.
    • Related to that, it can be tricky to coax something like “form” out of the density of detail.
    • And, of course, the timing of your visit to the scene has to be fortuitous – after the leaves have changed color but before they are all gone.

    I’ve certainly had my share of missed opportunities and compositions that didn’t work.

    So, what attracted me to this scene and what did I think about as I shot it and how did I handle some of these challenges?

    • I spent perhaps almost an hour wandering around in this smallish grove looking for subjects and compositions. While sometimes a composition just jumps out at me, more often I have to slow down a lot, spend time looking and wandering and considering, and eventually something will click.
    • Before I found this shot, I had several general notions in mind about what sorts of subjects might interest me – including but not limited to scenes like this – so I think I had some preconceptions of scene types that I might want to shoot. For example, I had a vague notion about something with a cluster of the vertical forms of the light colored trunks; I had another idea about gentle light on leaves that had fallen to the ground; I had an interest in including the bright canopy of backlit leaves; and so forth.
    • With all of that in mind, one of the kinds of scenes I was thinking about was more or less this one.
    • I had seen several other possibilities before I found this one, but all of them were too cluttered – foreground vegetation and so forth. This one was a bit more “open,” but I still chose to use a very wide angle lens so that I could shoot in close but still get (and perhaps amplify) the sense of front-to-back distance.
    • Although I’m not sure I was completely conscious of this at the time – it may have been intuitive – it seems to me that there are some “horizontals” in this composition: the larger leave-covered area in the foreground, the brighter colored area of leaves across the top, and the band just below that dominated by the verticals of the further trees.
    • In contrast to these horizontals, the trees obviously cut through that with their vertical forms.
    • Out of all this detail, I think that the fact that there is one foreground tree that both somewhat stands apart and connects to the background helps give this scene a bit more coherence.
    • I shot in very late afternoon light. The sun was dropping behind the forest and some distant mountains – and this helped a great deal with the dynamic range issues. Light was still coming into this scene from the sun but it was entirely filtered and diffused by the forest canopy and low angle of the sun. Important: In general, it is really, really difficult to shoot scenes like this in full sun – I almost always aim for very early or late times or for times when there is some overcast.

    I hope that this stream-of-conscience post might spark some ideas for you about how to approach this sort of subject!

    Take care,

    Dan

    Reply

  3. Clusters of trees like this are always perplexing to me in how to compose them. Here they seem in such harmony. Good separation of the trunks and a nice arrangement.

    Reply

Join the discussion — you are welcome to leave a comment or question. (Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately.)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.