Category Archives: Photographs: Fall Color

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Autumn Color Panorama

Image Leave a comment
Autumn Color Panorama
Eastern Sierra aspen trees in transition from summer to fall color on a cloudy afternoon

Autumn Color Panorama. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Eastern Sierra aspen trees in transition from summer to fall color on a cloudy afternoon

There is a pretty good chance that this will be my final fall aspen color photograph from the 2018 fall season. In some ways the season felt a bit different, but the grand pattern was a familiar one. The slight variations included what seemed like a slightly early appearance of color at high elevations — we saw some pretty decent color a full week before the end of September. The main part of the season seemed relatively typical, though I did find color appearing a bit later (surprise!) than expected in a few places I visited about a week into October. That was my final visit, but I did hear from folks who were still finding green groves at the end of the third week of the month. I don’t want to make too much of these observations, as I’ve started to feel that that general timetable does remain fairly similar

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspens Ascending A Gully

Image Leave a comment
Aspens Ascending A Gully
Colorful autumn aspen trees ascend a gully in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

Aspens Ascending A Gully. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Colorful autumn aspen trees ascend a gully in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

In the past I have looked at this grove but not photographed it. Unfortunately, it stands in close proximity to an Eastern Sierra Nevada “feature” that has long troubled me — a fake waterfall apparently created by a nearby homeowner who seems to have redirected a stream over the top of an outcropping in order to make his/her backyard more picturesque. Unfortunately, once you see how this was done you cannot unsee it, and the “waterfall” becomes an annoying and even insulting feature.

But there are these trees. And they are quite nice, following a narrow gully in the break between two outcroppings of solid Sierra rock. I like the way that the ascending band of trees narrows as it rises, almost suggesting a queue of travelers passing through a narrow pass. There are also some beautiful and colorful trees stretched across the bench at the top of the outcroppings. Finally, these trees are in the state of color transition that I’m almost ready to say I enjoy the most — that stage where a few trees are intensely yellow/gold and others are still just barely beginning to change.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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 | Twitter | Facebook |
Email

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Color

Image Leave a comment
Aspen Color
Colorful autumn aspen trees in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

Aspen Color. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Colorful autumn aspen trees in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

On the surface, at least, this is a very simple photograph… so it gets a simple title: Aspen Color. The trees are part of a large (and both popular and accessible) grove in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Like so many others, I stop here each autumn, and I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the trees rising from a creek to far up the surrounding slopes, almost committing to memory the general scene and many of its details. While many Sierra Nevada aspen trees tend to be short and somewhat twisted, at least by comparison to those familiar groves to Colorado trees standing straight and tall, in places in the Sierra you can find those big, stout, and tall trees. This grove is one of those places, though there are plenty of the smaller trees mixed in, too.

On the day I made this photograph the colors in the larger grove varied from deep green to extremely bright yellow/gold, with a few bits of red-orange visible here and there. The latter colors first caught my attention in the spot shown in the photograph. The reddish color was subtle and only in a small area, but it was the starting point for the idea of the photograph. It is hard to make some sort of order out of such complex detail, but the idea was to place a complete tree along the left side of the frame, put that bit of red-orange at lower right, and to include some of the leaves that had not yet lost their green tint.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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 | Twitter | Facebook |
Email

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Quiet Lake, Autumn Reflections

Image Leave a comment
Quiet Lake, Autumn Reflections
Autumn aspen trees reflected in the quiet surface of an Eastern Sierra Nevada lake

Quiet Lake, Autumn Reflections. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn aspen trees reflected in the quiet surface of an Eastern Sierra Nevada lake

Although this photograph does not show the “classic” view of this location, there may be enough here to make it look familiar. (If you know… shhhhh.) I stopped here at an “off-hour” that wasn’t the time of day when most people looking for to reproduce that classic photograph show up. That wasn’t my intention, and I now typically only go to this place (and others like it) when I suspect that something truly unusual might happen for the most part.

I arrived and wandered over to the often-crowded spot… to find that I was almost alone here. What an unusual pleasure! The water was extremely still for this time of day, and cloud-filtered light was coming from behind and to the left of the bright grove of aspen trees. They reflected beautifully in the lake, but I decided to interrupt that reflection and its symmetry by finding a way to include the grasses growing along the near shore of the lake, grasses that were themselves starting to take on the colors of autumn.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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 | Twitter | Facebook |
Email

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