First Light, Eastern Sierra. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Pre-sunrise light on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.
As I queue up photographs for future posts this morning I seem to be alternating, in a way, between the ridiculous and the sublime. The previous image I posted was one of a broken pumpkin, cast aside next to the curb on the morning after Halloween. The photograph shown here comes from a rather different sort of morning, before dawn in a high place just below the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, awaiting the arriving of sunrise light on an autumn morning.
Photographs (and, arguably, especially landscape photography) is largely about the light. The great subjects are always there, and many of them stand still for hours, days, seasons, years. But the light is never really the same twice, even though we can recognize certain categories of light. One beautiful sort is the softly colored light that may appear just before sunrise when the conditions in the sky are just right to produce some color. I had arrived at this location quite early, having made a prior plan to photograph here, but I could not know exactly what the light would do. Although my plan was to photograph the first sunrise light on the tops of the peaks, it was this soft, early light that turned out to be the most fascinating.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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