Aspen Groves, Sierra Crest. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. October 4, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Aspen groves follow the contours of foothills rising toward the Sierra Nevada crest.
Just for fun… a fall color photography in black and white! I have the greatest respect for our photographer predecessors who set about photographing the beauty of fall color with only monochromatic shades to work with. It can be done, but it isn’t quite as straightforward as photographing fall color with today’s capable digital cameras. It is all too easy to let those colorful leaves end up having monochromatic tones that aren’t that much different from the same trees in the green season! Light helps, as does some selective use of filters — glass filters in the old days and post-processing analogs applied to digital files today.
I made this photograph close to a rather popular fall color photography location, though the exact location isn’t quite in the usual spot. It presented a challenge or two that I won’t describe here. The light was, to use the old euphemism, “interesting” at this point. The late afternoon light was coming in at a low angle and lighting up the trees nicely, but the sky was a bit tricky. Some high clouds were floating over the Sierra crest peaks, and their brightness posed a dynamic range challenge while their shadows fell across the peaks. There are many things I like about this scene — the way the curving forms of the groves lead away and up toward the Sierra crest peak, the long shadows, the alternation of sunlit ridge and darker valleys, and those distant peaks with a bit of autumn snow dusting their summits.
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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