Aspen Grove, Late Afternoon. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late afternoon light on an Eastern Sierra Nevada autumn aspen grove,

Later in the Sierra Nevada aspen color transition many of the groves in this area had already lost their leaves — as you can see if you look towards the more distant trees. But the foreground trees were in that wonderful stage where there are still plenty of colorful leaves, yet enough of them have fallen to more clearly reveal the white aspen trunks. The late-afternoon side light, coming in low over the nearby Sierra crest, helped to make the leaves glow, too.

As I work my way toward the end of this year’s eastern Sierra fall color photography I’m thinking back on the nature of this season. Although the general contours of the color transition are often rather similar from year to year (aside from some of our recent extreme drought years) there are fascinating differences, too. Late in the summer this year I saw a lot of very healthy-looking aspen, probably as a result of two very good water years. That led me to expect that we the colors might be more spectacular than usual. In the end, there was plenty of wonderful color, and I managed to find it in some new-to-me locations… but the transition was unusual and overall not the most spectacular I have seen. It seemed to start a bit early and, to my surprise, in more places than usual I found trees that dropped leaves early. This grove is an example — in a more typical year most of the trees would likely have been in peak color when I made this photograph. No matter… one of the beauties of autumn aspen trees is that there are so many ways to photograph them, and if you don’t get vast groves of wild colors you may find another kind of beauty.

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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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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Grove Of Small Aspens. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A grove of small aspens with leaves beginning the transition to autumn color.

This photograph comes from very early in the annual eastern Sierra Nevada fall color transition. I would typically start my serious aspen color search in California about a week into October, but this year I was out looking during the first week of the month. In truth, you can find earlier color in the Sierra — sometimes due to unusual weather conditions during the past year and sometimes due to anomalous trees in certain places that change earlier than others. This grove of small trees lay in the shadows next to a rocky hill, and the color transition was just beginning.

I want to share a few other factors that crop up in this particular photographic interpretation. When photographing in shadows — as was the case here — the light can be very blue. We face an interesting question about how to deal with that in the post-processing phase. We could leave the image “as the camera saw it,” but because the camera doesn’t see the way we do it may look unusually blue. Or we could tone down the blue in any of several ways — lower the saturation of the blue channel, shift the color balance toward yellow, and so on. Here I did the latter, which is the more typical approach. There’s one other thing going on in the interpretation of this photo that bears mentioning. Various approaches to post-processing might be said to characterize the quality of many photographers’ styles. In this photograph I employed an increasingly common technique — one that I don’t generally use, but which can provide a different “look.” Essentially I softened aspects of the image and then compensated for that by altering other parameters that can produce what I think of as subjective sharpness — contrast, saturation, and adjustments to curves. I won’t give everything away here, but you might look at the photograph and see if you can identify some of what is going on in it.

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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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Yellow And Orange Grove. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn aspen grove in yellow and orange, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

Autumn is a great time to be a photographer in California. Yesterday I was in the Central Valley to photograph sandhill cranes and geese (mostly Canada geese, with a few others mixed in here and there), and almost exactly one month ago I was in the Sierra Nevada photographing fall aspen groves. That color has now worked its way to the west side of the range and is currently expanding into the lowlands closer to the coast. (OK, I won’t get into the issue with wildfire smoke. For now…)

I made this photograph very late in the day, in an Eastern Sierra Nevada canyon where the tall peaks of the crest brought the area into shadow well before actual sunset. I had arrived in time for the last backlight of the day on these trees, then sticking around long enough to photograph them in the soft, shadowed light. (I continued to follow that line of shadow back down the canyon to the east after photographing here.) The leaning trees are most likely the result of an active beaver population in this canyon, and the gnawed trunks nearby are evidence of their busywork.

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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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.