Before Dawn. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Soft pre-dawn light on a Sierra Nevada landscape of peaks, granite, and water.
Truth be told, this was actually more “right at dawn” than “before dawn,” but given the light that comes to this spot a bit later — and the fact that I had been up and out there for a while already — it had a before-dawn feelings. So I’ll leave the title as is! The camera position was less than a minute’s walk from my campsite in this 11,000′ Eastern Sierra backcountry valley where we spent a week at the end of August and during the first couple of days of September. This late season period is always my favorite in the Sierra high country — a sort of last breath of summer with plenty of hints of the autumn transition that is on its way.
These very early mornings have a “two-edged sword” quality about them. Objectively speaking, it is almost always a bit of a challenge to persuade myself to unzip my sleeping bag in pre-dawn darkness and cold to start the process of suiting up, collecting equipment, emerging from the tent, and heading out to be ready for the early light. Subjectively speaking, once you do it the results are virtually always well worth it — for the photographs, of course, but also for the quiet beauty of these first moments of the new day.
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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