Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary, Morning Musings, Photographers, Photographs: Photographers

Pick the Right Friends… (Morning Musings 9/29/14)

September 29, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

G Dan Mitchell Photographing in the Sierra Nevada

If you are ever in the wilderness and you want someone to take a photograph of you, you could hand your smartphone to the nearest person and hope for the best. However, I have a few suggestions (slightly tongue-in-cheek) that might improve the odds:

Arrange to be in the company of one of the best landscape photographers working today. (Yeah, that’s you, Charlie Cramer.)
Make a photograph of him at work and hope that this inspires him to photograph you doing the same thing.
Be sure to place yourself so that dramatic golden hour light hits you in partial profile.
Be sure to position yourself against an appropriate background.
Gaze attentively and thoughtfully into the distance. ;-)

Bonus hint: Be sure to level your tripod first, or your photographer friends may never let you live it down. ;-)

Here’s a photograph of Charlie at work, too

In all seriousness, when you are out shooting, do photograph your fellow photographers. Each of us needs photographs of ourselves, and a photograph by a friend (or of a friend) is a special thing.

Thanks, Charlie!

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Commentary, Ideas, Morning Musings, Not Photography

Social Media and the Death of the Web (Morning Musings 9/27/14)

September 27, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Dan Mitchell 1977 Website Screenshot — Dan Mitchell 1997 Website Screenshot *

How many of us have considered the ways in which popular social media services — which admittedly are hugely appealing in many ways — are doing an effective job of killing the world wide web and undoing the early promise that it offered of direct and open access, along with visibility proportionate to quality, and critical disintermediation?

A few years back there was this astonishing, exciting, powerful, accessible thing called the world wide web, on which virtually anyone could share their story, their creative work, their business — and we saw the beginnings of the great disintermediation as boundaries were broken and the middlemen who had stood between content producers and consumers began to disappear. This was a world filled with promise. Those who produced valuable and interesting content (as differentiated from those who simply channeled it) could connect directly with a world of people who found that content compelling, and those looking for content could easily find it and follow it. Word got around, and it did so fairly directly, with little or no intermediation by those who had controlled traditional media.

Social media applications are seductive things, especially during their start-up phase, when the typical approach has involved giving away (or at least appearing to give away) a great deal of access by means of what seem like very open platforms. In fact, many who jumped onto these platforms early on did manage to leverage their initial power to their advantage. However, virtually without exception, these applications have morphed in directions that do not enable our own control over what we see and who we connect to, but which instead take control out of our hands and determine for us what we will see, most often based on generating advertising revenue — an old model that takes us back to (to coin a term) nondisintermediation.

Continue reading →

Commentary, Events, Locations, Morning Musings

Sierra Nevada Fall Color (Morning Musings 8/25/14)

August 25, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

For various reasons — projects I’m working on, clear signs of the changing seasons, photographs I’ve recently seen — I have been getting into that autumn frame of mind that comes at about this time every year. With that in mind, today’s “morning musings” post is about finding and photographing fall color in the Sierra Nevada. Rather than re-writing the whole thing, I’ll start by pointing you to an extensive guide that I wrote a few years ago and have updated every year since that time — if you are thinking of chasing aspen color this fall you may want to take a look: “Sierra Nevada Fall Color — Coming Sooner Than You Think”

If things evolve on a relatively typical schedule, eastern Sierra aspen color is perhaps about six weeks away. I have been photographing this subject for a while now, and it is one of my favorites. I intend to be out there again this fall.

One popular game at this time of year is to predict/guess when the colors will arrive and how good they will be. I’m fully aware that I’ve been wrong quite a few times, and my increasing knowledge of this subject has perhaps only made me more aware of how unpredictable this can be. However, this year I have to wonder about the effects on the trees from our three-year California drought, which has reached an extreme level all across the state this year. I don’t know what the results will be, but I’m considering some possibilities:

During the last two years it seemed to me that I was seeing the onset of color move a bit earlier in the season. I have to wonder if we may see stressed trees go into fall mode a bit on the early side this year.
Some people say that they are seeing a few aspen groves turning brownish-yellow already and looking like they are drying out.
Also during the last few dry years we have seen some anomalous early season storms, and I wonder if that pattern will continue. This can affect the season in various ways if it happens. On the negative side, leaves can blow down early. On the positive side, snow and aspens can make a beautiful pair.

As always, to the extent possible, I like to remain flexible about when and where I’ll photograph the aspens, and I watch the evolving conditions to see what this season may bring. How about you? What are your fall color plans?

Commentary, Equipment, Ideas, Morning Musings

Concerning Megapixels

August 20, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

(This is another in a series of articles based on posts I shared elsewhere. This one is based on a reply to a post concerning how important it is to move to a newer, improved sensor with higher photo site density. The immediate question had to do with how often the improvements would be significant enough to be seen, and the writer had correctly pointed out that there can be advantages to higher “MP count” when making very large, high quality prints.)

It is useful to try for a realistic understanding of how and when a higher MP sensor may show its advantages. This post tries to not take a position on brands and models, but rather to lay out a comparison of some relevant technical stuff — from which we can all draw our own individual conclusions.

There is a point below which you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between prints made from 22MP and 36MP cameras and above which you might be able to.(1) For example, virtually everyone would agree that the difference is typically completely invisible in small web images, and virtually everyone would agree that it could be visible if you closely inspect a print that is six feet wide. Since we could debate just where the boundary is — and, frankly, it is somewhat subjective — you could pick any point on the print size scale that you want and the principles will be the same.

Some Comparisons

Just for fun, let me use completely arbitrarily use two print sizes and base the comparisons on the 22MP Canon 5D Mark III and the Sony/Canon 36MP sensor cameras. Continue reading Concerning Megapixels →

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Commentary

Pick the Right Friends… (Morning Musings 9/29/14)

Sierra Nevada Fall Color (Morning Musings 8/25/14)

Concerning Megapixels

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.