Sub-Alpine Ponds in Afternoon Light, Artist Point. Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington. August 28, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A trail weaves through meadow and among sub-alpine ponds at Artist Point with the ridge of Mt. Shuksan beyond – Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington.
This is another photograph from my late-August afternoon exploration of the stunning ridgeline of Artist Point in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest near the Mt. Baker ski area. This ridge runs through an intimate landscape comprised of small rock fields, meadows with running streams, groves and isolated high elevation trees, and small ponds – and provides a truly stunning panorama that takes in Mount Baker on one side and Mount Shuksan on the other, with distant peaks all around. We could hardly have asked for better conditions for late-afternoon photography. Dramatic clouds ringed the peaks, sometimes obscuring them and sometimes clearing for a moment, and bright sun alternated with softer and diffused light as cloud shadows moved across the ridge.
A bit further along the ridge there is a series of small snow-melt lakes – what I usually refer to as “tarns” in the Sierra. Here a trail winds in front of a couple of them that sit in rocky hollows in front a few ridgeline trees, with the cloud-shrouded shoulder of glacier-covered Mount Shuksan beyond.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
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You guys are awesome, Michael and Dan, and co!
Joshua, I’ve done a bit of checking around and in addition to Gordon’s post – which includes some of the suggestions from the others – here are some recommendations. Since I didn’t ask those who provided them if I could post their names, I’ll post them anonymously for now:
From my Face Book page:
“The only places that come to mind immediately are the G2 Gallery (in Santa Monica), and the Santa Monica Mountains visitor center (I think they have, or are about to show, several of Steve Sieren’s pics, so maybe he can chime in, too, with …better info), and the Ordover Gallery in San Diego.
And, of course, the Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop is just four hours from LA, if they want to drive a little farther.”
Some of Steven Sieren’s work is on display at the Santa Monica Mountains Nat’l Rec Area Visitor Center
401 West Hillcrest Drive
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
Front desk 805-3…70-2301
right off the 101 freeway at Lynn rd
From a thread at Fred Miranda:
– “Best I can come up with is the Ordover Gallery down in Salana Beach, in Northern San Diego County, about 90 miles south of the “Shakin’ City”. Never been there, but I’ve heard great things about both locations from relatives living in the area. http://www.ordovergallery.com/index.html”
– “Not dedicated to landscapes, but it seems to to be a great place and somewhere I still need to get to is the Annenberg Space for Photography: http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/”
– “I haven’t been too impressed with the images on display at the ordover in solana beach. They have mostly canvas prints. I guess that is what has been selling lately. To see better work, there is a gallery by the Ordover in the San Diego Natural History Museum. If you are a fan of Peter Lik, he has a gallery in La Jolla. [Ben Horne will have] some big LF prints In a Laguna Beach gallery starting next month. The prints are currently in production.”
Ben Horne reports: “Dan,
I’m going to have my stuff in the Townley Gallery in Laguna Beach starting October 1st. It’s going to be there pretty much on a permanent basis. I’m still working out all the details, but here is the website:
http://www.townleygallery.com/
I should have 3 large pieces on display.”
Hope this is useful.
Dan
Michael – thanks for that list!
Dan
Hi Dan, Joshua:
G2 Gallery in Venice;
Ordover Gallery in San Diego;
Susan Spiritus in Newport Beach;
Tom Mangelsen’s Gallery in La Jolla;
Michael Gordon’s studio in Long Beach :)
That’s about it anymore for pure landscape/nature in SoCal. The recession/depression has not been kind to galleries!
Joshua, the recommendation is a bit tough for me since I’m not centered in southern California. Let’s see what I can offer.
It is always a good idea to see what is going on at the Getty Center. They have a great photographic collection, and generally have some current display or another that is compelling. They are not always landscape oriented, but sometimes they are – and these shows are impressive. I saw an Edward Weston show there a few years back that also included photographs by his various associates, including Adams and others. (The current shows don’t seem to be particularly landscape oriented: http://www.getty.edu/visit/calendar/days/09032010.html)
Although I haven’t yet visited (I’ve tried, but missed), the Annenberg Space for Photography (http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/) is undoubtedly worth a visit.
If you are near UC-Irvine, they have an interesting collection of Ansel Adams prints, including many from a series he was commissioned to do for the UC system many years ago.
Although it is outside of your distance boundary – but just barely – you can see a great collection of prints by Galen Rowell and often at least one other photographer at the Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop, California.
I’ve put the word out that I’d like to get recommendations for other LA area landscape photography galleries, and I’ll share any responses here.
Dan
Thanks for the write-up. Yeah, I bet the photo is immersive in large size.
Now that you mentioned it (somehow), can you suggest a photo gallery (landscape/nature) to visit? Ideally close to LA/Orange county, but I don’t mind driving 3-5 hours if that’s what it takes. I haven’t been in photography scene that long and I’ve been only to one gallery in Utah. Thanks in advance.
Let me take the second question first, Joshua – and it is a good one. It isn’t always the case, but certain photographs work best small (think Henri Cartier-Bresson for example) and others work better large (think Jeff Wall). There are, I think, a number of reasons that this can be the case. In the case of this Cascades photo, to the extent that I might be right about it (and, to be honest, I’m not always right! ;-) I think a few things might be at work.
1. The scale of the scene is “monumental.” There is nothing in the scene that is extremely close to the camera position (in contrast to the “ferns” and “heather” photographs) and the scale of the subjects tends towards the large – the two lakes, but especially the distant clouds and peaks with the large valley between.
2. The amount of detail is great, and much of it cannot be seen in small web-based image. (When downsizing for the web, in general each pixel of the web image interpolates approximately 100 pixels of detail from the original image!) In some cases, a large and very detailed image contains a lot of visually interesting material that is only apparent with close inspection. As a musician, certain pieces of music might provide an analogy. With some pieces you can pretty much “get” what is going on after one or two hearings. But with others (for me this might include, for example, certain Mahler symphonies) I cannot really “get” the work with one hearing, but scores of hearings later I am still uncovering details and connections that I didn’t hear at first.
3. At the other extreme, certain really effective photographs work largely on the basis of larger scale elements of color and light and form or the human interest of the subject.
I don’t know how “right” my thoughts are on this, but this is stuff I think about when I consider how and why a photograph does and does not work.
Now, back to your first question – Asking “why I pressed the shutter” is a wonderful and deceptively complex thing to ask – great question! There is a lot I could say about this, so again I’ll take the approach of offering a few thoughts but not trying for a definitive answer.
I don’t always consciously know fully and precisely why I choose a particular subject or scene or composition at the time of the exposure. This, I think, bothers some people – in particular those who like to think that all photographs are fully pre-visualized and carefully and logically considered. What I’ve found is that many, many photographers actually rely a great deal on intuition when they are in the field. While they bring to bear a lot of specific knowledge, both technical and aesthetic, somehow at the moment of making the photograph there is a great deal of intuitive “seat of the pants” stuff at work. Often when I’m figuring out a composition I work this way and at some point I “just know” that it is “right,” even though I don’t necessarily fully analyze why. (To be honest, the analytical stuff is sometimes part of the process, too, but it is almost never the whole thing.)
Here I had an idea about including the foreground lake on the left side of the frame, the impressive bit of sky, and the peaks receding into the distance in the far center. (If I recall, I had just asked by brother if he knew anything about those very distant peaks.) I started looking for a composition lower on the slope, closer to that lake, but as I looked at the result I felt that I should climb the slope and move back a bit to get a higher perspective on the lake and to include a bit more of the foreground and the bit of trail. I was probably subconsciously aware of a series of contrasting diagonals in the scene – the foreground rocks and trail rising from left to right, the far shore of the lake rising from right to left, the middle rocks with the grove of trees again reversing and rising from left to right, the slope of the ridge of Shuksan again reversing and rising from right to left, and then the sky/clouds sort of “cradled” above this. I was also thinking of the small grove of trees as being the central object, and I waited until the light illuminated them before exposing.
One valid criticism of the image, especially from someone who might not get off on the visual complexity of the image, is that there are multiple centers of interest. Someone who looks for one central subject in every photograph might wonder: “Is it the lake? the trees? Shuksan? The sky?”
In this case, my answer might just be, “yes.” :-)
Take care,
Dan
No, I don’t expect to see a great photo everyday. I was just curious why you pressed the shutter, that’s all.
It’s interesting that you said this photograph works when enlarged. Is it because when a photograph is large, the person will look at the photograph a portion at a time?
Hmmm… Hard to say. One thing I do believe is that a photograph like this one works less well in the small confines of a web page, and may work better in a large print. But not every photo I post is going to be a success for everyone! :-)
I think I’ve posted before about my goal in posting a new photo every day, something I’ve now been doing for a period of perhaps three years. I don’t believe that I can possible produce a great photograph every day. Ansel supposedly said that he thought he might produce a really good photograph about once per month on average… and I’m not Ansel! So, what is the point of posting 365 photographs every year, when I know that some (many, actually!) will not necessarily be great? A few things come to mind:
1. With a background in music, the idea of practice is important to me. Working constantly to produce photographs – taking them all the way from shutter click to final (web) image – keeps my “visual system” tuned up.
2. The “responsibility” to post daily pushes me to stay focused and continuously create new work.
3. I feel that it might be interesting to some readers/viewers to watch the process, and to see the relationship between the photographs that I make daily and those that occasionally rise above and seem special.
Thanks for posting, Joshua.
Dan
Is this the case of so many things competing for attention and the overall photo becomes uninteresting? Nothing really jumped out of the frame and grabbed my attention.
I’m curious now if this kind of composition (the one that includes many elements, far and close, but no strong foreground) and angle (from a vantage point) will ever work.