All posts by G Dan Mitchell

G Dan Mitchell, photographer and visual opportunist focusing on the Pacific coast, the Sierra Nevada, redwood forests, California oak/grasslands, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography and more. Posting daily photographs since 2005, along with articles, reviews, news, and ideas.

Photographs: Central California

Late-Autumn Coastal Forest

Image December 23, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Big Sur River runs past late-autumn deciduous forest.

Scenes like this one are actually easy to find all over coastal California and even at many inland locations. These low elevation forests, especially those where the climate is moderated by proximity to the Pacific Ocean, tend to be quiet and gentle places. As such, it is easy to overlook them, especially when far more dramatic landscapes about.

In fact, on this December day I found myself here after realizing that the conditions were far from ideal for photographing some of those nearby dramatic landscapes. The gray skies of an incoming Pacific weather front made the long views at the coast less than exciting, so I headed a few miles inland and found this beautiful section of the Big Sur River, where the water flowed past quietly and autumn big leaf maple leaves littered the ground.

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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Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Paoha Island, Mono Lake

Image December 22, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The view across Mono Basin, including Mono Lake and Paoha Island.

The light in this scene appeals to me. Yes, the view itself is impressive, but the warm-colored early-morning light is especially lovely. It is also a bit deceptive. It probably looks like a warm high-desert day, but the truth was quite different. It was an extremely cold autumn morning, and as we drove we encountered temperatures as low as high single-digits at one point. Ah, that’s fall in the Eastern Sierra!

I made the photograph from a high point above the southwest shoreline of Mono Lake, on a hill that was easily accessible. The view follows the slope down toward the very blue surface of this hug lake, then continues across Paoho Island. Although it is blocked by the island, the water continues beyond it to the far shoreline, where gentle slopes that were once submerged when the lake was larger lead to mountains that surround the Mono Basin.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Night

Evening Grove

Image December 21, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A grove of old trees in late-autumn evening light.

This is the second of several photographs that resulted from going to some local holiday festivities — a big garden and mansion decked out in holiday lights and more… but it sure doesn’t look like a holiday scene! After we arrived and parked our car we had to walk to the main facilities and along the way we passed this old grove. In the fading light (somewhat darker than the rendition in the photograph) it had a quality that was somewhere between slightly ominous and simply quiet and dark.

Typically I would probably use a tripod for a photograph like this one, but since our main reason for going to this event wasn’t necessarily to make photographs I did not have one, so I cranked up the ISO and held the camera very still!

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Big Sur River, Autumn

Image December 20, 2019 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Fallen leaves and trees along the banks of the Big Sur River.

There is a little lesson or reminder in this photograph that I made earlier this week along a quiet stretch of the Big Sur River. I had planned to head south to photograph along this coastline. This is my favorite time of year along the California coast — the season when the surf can be huge, lots of spray gets thrown up, and there are often interesting clouds. Oh, and there are far fewer tourists in this sometimes-crowded location. However, the light was not cooperating, at least not with my original plan of photographing grand coastal landscape. A Pacific weather front was on its way, and the sky was rather gray and there was some ugly atmospheric haze.

However, as is so often the case, light conditions that may not be wonderful for one subject can work to your advantage with another. The high clouds were still thin enough that they allowed somewhat directional but very diffused light to pass. While that may not be great for those long landscapes, this light can be beautiful inside forests, even during the daytime hours when more typical sunny conditions can produce the nearly unphotographable “pizza light.” So I started looking for different sorts of subjects, and I soon noticed the green water of this river and the bare trunks of these trees standing above a carpet of newly-fallen autumn leaves.

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