I would like to thank Aperture Academy for making me the subject of their June “Featured Photographer” interview. (Thanks are also due to photographer Brian Rueb for setting up and conducting the interview.) As some of you know, I’m rarely at a loss for words… so the interview is long – but you might enjoy reading a few things about me that I probably have not mentioned here at the blog.
While you are there, take a look in the sidebar to see the list of previous interview subjects. I’m honored to be on a long list that includes the following photographers: Bret Edge, Alex Mody, Colby Brown, Brian Rueb, Richard Bernabe, Guy Tal, QT Luong, Stephen W. Oachs, Joshua Holko, Art Wolfe, Dylan Fox, Rod Thomas, Ian Plant, Steve Sieren, Miles Morgan, Jay & Varina Patel, Jon Cornforth, Paul Marcellini, Neal Pritchard, Ryan Dyar, Floris van Breugel, Elleene “Ellie” Stone, David Cobb, Sean Bagshaw, Adam Attoun, and Jesse Estes. You could probably spend half a day reading all of these interviews!
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.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
An illuminating interview all around, but the part that tickled me was toward the end: where you identify the coastal redwood forests as your most challenging environment. Out of challenges can come remarkable successes, I gues, and all I have to do to find an example is at the top of this page (your banner photo for this blog.) In an environment where almost everyone who snaps a shutter tries to emphasize its stunning verticality, you have made a novel horizontal strip work extremely well.
Thanks! I still do find this subject challenging. When I encounter some subjects (sub-alpine and alpine Sierra Nevada, rocks and cliffs, certain seascapes, some urban environments) I immediately see photographs, occasionally so many that I can’t capture all of them. But I really have to look when photographing the redwoods. The places are so compelling, but they are also very dense with “stuff” in front and back, left and right, above and below.
Thanks for noticing the horizontal photograph of the vertical subject. That was intentional and for pretty much the reasons you mention. One day I was thinking about the literal experience (rather than the photographic experience) of walking among these trees and it occurred to me that I rarely do look straight up into the canopy, but instead tend to look ahead and through the trees, scanning horizontally. While thinking about this I realized that I could perhaps suggest the massive vertical scale by showing the subject more the way I see it, and not even trying to put it all in the frame.