Category Archives: Photographs: Fall

Photographs of fall color

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

Birch Trunks, Fall Foliage

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Birch Trunks, Fall Foliage
White birch tree trunks emerge from a sea of fall color, New England.

Birch Trunks, Fall Foliage. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

White birch tree trunks emerge from a sea of fall color, New England.

For this California photographer, the autumn. Eastern Sierra aspens are some of the most interesting trees. Their leaves can certainly be colorful — often yellow/gold, but also ranging through orange and red. But their white or near-white trunks set them apart. They are fascinating no matter what the leaves are doing — spring. green, autumn color, or winter bare. I take it that there are aspens in New England, though their presence is overwhelmed by the other trees that we don’t see in California. As I photographed in the Northeast it seemed to me that that birch trees are more or less the aspen surrogates there, and they often provide similarly interesting trunk structures.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of Northeastern fall color, to the point that it sometimes is difficult to make a photograph of the subject. I know that may sound strange — those colors are exciting, so why not just point the camera at them and make pictures? That’s exactly the problem. It is easy for the colors to be the whole show, so I look for other things that can tie them together in some sort of form. Tree trunks can often do this. A few trunks slicing, twisting, or slanting through a scene can give it direction and flow that is hard to achieve in a photograph of just the colorful leaves.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Aspen Grove, Red and Gold

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Aspen Grove, Red and Gold
Red and gold autumn color in an Eastern Sierra Nevada aspen grove.

Aspen Grove, Red and Gold. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Red and gold autumn color in an Eastern Sierra Nevada aspen grove.

A small change in a subject can alter how we see it and even make photographs possible in a location that might have not worked in the past. I have driven past this grove scores of times, occasionally stopping to. look at some colorful nearby trees. But I never took the time to walk just a little bit further to this camera position. Why not? Often there are too many people here, and when I usually visit the color is not at its prime. But this time I came about a week later and on a quiet weekday. The color was much more interesting, and the entire time I was there I saw only one other person.

The beginning of the Sierra aspen color season is a special time, and the beginning of the transition never fails to catch my attention. My favorite time frame is usually the first two weeks of October, perhaps because the start of the change is so compelling. But things are different — and equally interesting — a bit later, following that early color peak. I made this photograph in the third week of the month, when trees at the higher elevations had already lost most of their leaves. Even here a lot of foliage had fallen. However, this meant that virtually all of the remaining leaves were shades of yellow, orange, and red… and the thinner foliage revealed the white aspen trunks.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

Leaves, Boulders in the Stream

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Leaves, Boulders in the Stream
Autumn leaves lie on builders in the middle of a White Mountains forest stream.

Leaves, Boulders in the Stream. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Autumn leaves lie on builders in the middle of a White Mountains forest stream.

After we stopped here to photograph a couple of lonely creeks passing though hardwood forest along a remote backroad I looked around for smaller subjects within the larger scene that had originally convinced me to stop. I had been looking at the forest as a whole, set off by the stream following a path bending beneath the canopy of trees. Eventually I thought to look more or less at my feet, where I noticed fallen leaves on boulders around which the creeks flowed.

Photographing these dense forest scenes in the Northeast can be something of a challenge. I’m used to more open forests that I see on the West Coast, where the light shines in between the trees, and the view extends some distance. In New England the trees are smaller and grow more densely, and it is often difficult to see more than a few feet into the woods, and even more difficult to find a view that without a trunk, branch, or stick intruding into the frame. All of this is by way of saying that it was not at all easy to isolate this little scene!

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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

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

Eastern Sierra Aspens

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Eastern Sierra Aspens
Late-season Eastern-Sierra aspens in green, yellow, and orange.

Eastern Sierra Aspens. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Late-season Eastern-Sierra aspens in green, yellow, and orange

With this post I interrupt the recent stream of New England fall color photographs to bring you fall color from California’s Eastern Sierra. Our productive trip to photograph the beautiful fall color in (mostly) New Hampshire cut into the time I would usually spend in the Sierra during the aspen color season, but I wasn’t about to miss it entirely. So I managed a four-day trip to the “East Side” last week, visiting several promising aspen color locations. As a result, I’ll eventually have a bit more to say about two subjects: a comparison between the East and West Coast experiences, and the prospects of finding Sierra color after the middle of October.

As I post this year’s Sierra aspen photographs, you’ll probably notice that I made many of them in soft light: near dawn or dusk, in the shadow of nearby mountains, or under some degree of cloudiness. Despite my love of backlit trees, this is my favorite kind o light for photographing the fall colors. To me the colors seem richer, and I can maintain more shadow detail than I typically get in the harsher direct sunlight. I made this photograph late in the day on the east side of the range, shortly after the sun had dropped behind the Sierra crest.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Twitter | 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.