Morning, Wildfire Smoke. Mono Lake, California. September 18, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Wildfire smoke layer drift, above Mono Lake at sunrise

The subject of this photograph comes about as close to being insubstantial as possible. When I began photographing before dawn on this September morning, Mono Lake was still mostly visible, though a large cloud of wildfire smoke was gathering to the southeast and beginning to drift toward the lake. First, layers of smoke began to stretch individually across the lake as sunrise approached. As more of them arrived they began to completely obscure the more distant landscape and to mute the colors and details of objects that were even closer. If you look at this photograph for a moment you can begin to see what remains — a bit of a peninsula with some tufa formations along the right margin, and in the lower center and stretching toward the left some soft reflections of morning light on the surface of the lake.

For a moment when I first saw the smoke I was disappointed that it might interfere with my photography, but it only took a moment to realize that these were special and beautiful conditions not likely to occur that often. The smoke and the morning backlight rendered details almost invisible, only seen faintly through gaps in the smoke. The smoke itself, dividing into layers and taking on subtle colors from the morning back-light, filled the scene with nearly abstract shapes. But before long smoke filled in even more, and soon it was too opaque to photograph at all.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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