Yosemite Valley, New Snow, Morning - Classic winter view of snow-covered Yosemite Valley scene photographed from Wawona Tunnel View after a late-winter storm.
It has been a bit of a tradition to post a photograph of Yosemite Valley in snow on Christmas Day – it seems like the Sierra way to send seasons greetings! I hope that you and yours are having a wonderful holiday!
(The photograph was made on the morning after a late-winter snow storm in The Valley back in 2006.)
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Meadow plants bend beneath the weight of an early October snowfall, eastern Sierra Nevada, California.
I made this photograph on a very cold early October morning high in the eastern Sierra after a series of early season snow storms had passed over the Sierra. The gravel road to North Lake had apparently just opened again on the morning I arrived, and few other people were there. I was there to photograph autumn aspen color, but the opportunity to photograph snow scenes so early in the season distracted me.
As I walked the road skirting the edge of North Lake, I passed by meadows that were completely covered by new, untouched snow. Here and there a few small plants managed to poke up from beneath the white blanket.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
This youtube video includes all of the photographs posted at my blog during 2011.* Yes, all of them! The photographs appear more or less in the order they were made, so this forms a sort of year-long overview. Since it does include everything, there are going to be a few, uh, slow moments in the video. (I do not recommend viewing at full screen size on large monitors since the original images used in the video were relatively small.)
If this is a slow day for you, you could even watch the whole thing!
I put this together while doing initial work on the 2001 Favorites list, an annual project of assembling a set of what I regard as some of my best work of the past year. I have some ideas about which images will make the cut for that more limited set, but I’d love to hear your opinions about what you think should be included, too. I’ll post the “finalists” for the 2011 Favorites sometime in the next week or so.
* OK, I made a lot more photographs in 2011 than what you see here. But most will never be seen in public. :-)
(Update: A few people asked “why no music to accompany the photographs?” This brings up a whole series of thoughts that I should explore in depth at some point, but which I’ll mention briefly for now. Let me get the easy one out of the way first – this wasn’t meant to be a “real” production. It was just a way for me to string together a large number of images as part of my own review of my 2011 photographs. On to the more complex issues…
Some of you may know that my academic training is in music. So, for me, adding music to images is not a simple thing – I’m afraid that I’m cursed with thinking “too much” about what it means and how it works together. For me, the idea of just “adding some music” is not a simple idea at all. In fact, it raises some questions about why we think that individual photographs are worthy of consideration in silence… but sequences of them seem to raise expectations that a musical accompaniment will be provided. Finally, given the diverse images in this large set it is hard for me to come up with a meaningful musical accompaniment that somehow ties in with the images in more than a random way. I suppose that I really need to compose my own… )
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Winter surf at twilight at Asilomar Beach, Pacific Grove, California.
I was in the Monterey Peninsula area for several days in mid-December for mostly non-photographic reasons, but I managed to get away and make some photographs on several occasions. On this evening I had just enough time to quickly head over to the Pacific Grove area at Asilomar Beach in the evening. I arrived a bit before sunset and quickly found a spot with several photographic possibilities.
I began by shooting along a the beach toward the setting sun, and including the figures of lots of people who were out strolling along this beach. I though that the silhouettes of the people were interesting, along with the colors of the late-day sky and their reflections on the water and the wet areas of the sand. After the sun dropped below the horizon I mostly stopped photographing people – my shutter speeds had to be too low to stop their motion – and I began to work with longer exposures that allowed the water to blur to a greater or lesser extent, while focusing more on the intense colors of the post-sunset period.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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