Category Archives: Photographs: Central California

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Rocky Shoreline, Fog, Big Sur

July 5, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Steep cliffs fall to the edge of the Pacific Ocean along the fog-shrouded Big Sur coastline

I left very early on this Fourth of July morning, while the streets were still nearly empty near my home, and headed south towards Monterey and the Big Sur coast. I watch weather forecasts carefully before going there this time of year. The most likely conditions are not my favorites for photography — either socked in with coastal for or else blue-sky clear. I’m looking for something in between in the summer, which ideally means that there is still some fog around but that the sun is poking through along the edges. The forecast today was one of those that is peculiar to California, with fog hugging the coast early but breaking up by midday and the temperatures in the inland areas, which are sometimes only a few miles from the foggy areas, rising into the nineties. Hoping to find that sun/fog boundary, I was willing to chance the holiday traffic, though I figured I might beat the worst of it by going there before “normal people” were awake, and then by returning at about the time the crowds would show up.

I hit fog in the Salinas Valley, which meant that the fog on the coast was likely to be a bit more obstinate about leaving than I had hoped. In fact, there was a low deck of fog perhaps only a few hundred feet above the ocean, with misty atmosphere below. This is not easy light to photograph, at least not for me, but I found a few places like this one where I could get a clear view of nearby subjects and include more distant subjects disappearing into the fog. I walked out on the bluff to find this spot, set up, and noticed that the fog was in motion, so I decided to wait, eventually spending perhaps 20 minutes waiting and watching for moments like this when the fog thinned just enough to barely reveal the further rocks and coast.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Winter Sky

July 4, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening winter sky above California’s San Joaquin Valley

From that hour between late afternoon and the sometimes-fiery colors of sunset, a winter sky over the San Joaquin Valley of California, photographed on New Years Day 2014. Every so often I see a sky and what to photograph it, separated from the landscape below, and forming its own sort vaporous cloudscape.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

July 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Motion blur abstraction of a winter scene with three birds landing

Near the end of the day, well along into the dusk hour, with light fading fast, I decided to take advantage of the poor light and “play” a bit with very slow shutter speeds and intentional camera motion. By moving the camera in various ways during the exposure I can control to some extent the angle, length, and linearity of the blur. In some cases it is enough to just track the birds — and give the less fuzzy image of the three central birds, I am pretty certain that is what I was doing here. In other cases I can basically ignore the motion of my subjects and simply think about how to move the camera to create patterns in the motion blur.

I’ve often felt that working for sharply focused, stopped motion images of birds is not the only way to depict whatever it is that attracts me to them. The camera lets us see birds in ways that we really cannot usually see them with our own eyes. When birds are in motion it is almost impossible — at least with many types of birds — to clearly see them. They move too fast and the motion of wings is essentially impossible to track visually. And when we do stop them with a fast shutter speed, while we get to see them with a kind of clarity that isn’t otherwise possible, we may also sacrifice that sense of constant motion. So I started playing with the idea of intentionally avoiding sharp focus, allowing camera motion to come into play and using slow shutter speeds to allow the birds to blur and to blur their surroundings as the camera moves. To me, this sometimes evokes more strongly the feeling of the fast motion that I observe among these birds, and creates a different sort of honest portrayal of them.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Ross’s Geese, Marsh, Evening Light

July 1, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A large flock of Ross’s geese, some airborne, in a San Joaquin Valley marsh, winter

Six months ago it was New Year’s Day 2014, and I was in the San Joaquin Valley with friends, joining a joyous and raucous throng of migratory birds at a party welcoming the new year. Today, at the opposite point on our annual journey around the sun, it is very hot and dry here in California, and thoughts of this January day were hardly on my mind until I started to revisit some photographs from earlier this year — and was reminded that we are now halfway back through the year on our way to another New Year’s Day.

In the evening these geese were more or less settled into the marshland at this San Joaquin Valley location, with small groups coming and going. I’m certain it was cold, and the cries of the birds filled that air, and the surface of the marsh reflected evening clouds as the day came to an end.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Central California

Rocky Shoreline, Fog, Big Sur

Winter Sky

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

Ross’s Geese, Marsh, Evening Light

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