Category Archives: Photographs: Fall

Photographs of fall color

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

The Last Leaves

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The Last Leaves
An aspen tree with a few remaining autum leaves, against a cliff face wtih snow.

The Last Leaves. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Aspen trees with a few remaining autumn leaves, against a cliff face with snow.

The Sierra Nevada experience of the past year-and-a-half or so has been… strange. Everything has changed since our world was turned upside down in March of 2020, and my ability to visit and photograph my favorite mountain range has not been an exception. During the first summer we saw many locations simply shut down, and I didn’t really get into the Sierra until the very end of that summer — but only for very brief visits and one aborted pack trip that I had to cancel as a result of the intense wildfire smoke. By last winter I was again able to more comfortably get to non-Sierra locations including Death Valley, where it was possible to work in relative isolation, but the Sierra remained difficult to access. I got up there a few times later in the season, but it wasn’t until this fall that I felt that I was beginning to reconnect with this landscape.

In mid-October we put together an actual road trip. It began with a couple of nights in the Eastern Sierra before continuing on to Southwest Utah, another location that I hadn’t been to in far too long. This brief autumn Sierra visit (which followed another visit a week earlier) was a bit later than usual, and we ended up visiting a few places that I usually overlook… and heading to a few “old friends” even though they were past their prime. I made this photograph in one of those places, a location where the colors are usually spectacular a bit earlier in the season. I knew that wouldn’t be the case this time, so we went there a bit later in the day after photographing more promising morning subjects. We arrived, made a quick stop, and I spotted this small group of trees in the shadow of a cliff. They were nearly at the end of their color transition and most of the leaves were gone, but those that remained glowed in the bit of light arriving over the top of the cliff.

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: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Oak Tree, Red Rock

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Oak Tree, Red Rock
A twisting oak tree beneath red rock towers, Zion National Park.

Oak Tree, Red Rock. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A twisting oak tree beneath red rock towers, Zion National Park.

The title simplifies the content of this scene — there are actually several kinds of trees here, and the contrast between the lighter trunk of the foreground tree and the dark shape of the more distant tree is part of what attracted me to this scene. Other elements included the twisting shapes of the trees and the contrast between the bright green of the leaves (which are close to beginning their autumn color transition) and the red Utah sandstone.

The nature of light is almost always a key factor in photography, but it plays out in very special ways in the red rock canyons of the Southwest. As I have written previously, the typical photographers’ schedule (shoot very early and rather late) is upended in canyons. We often try to find the softer and warmer light of the very early and late hours of the day, but in these canyons the tall walls often keep the subjects in the soft shadow light much of the day, and direct sunlight reflected off the canyon walls can provide that warm color to the light. (To those used to having a midday break between morning and evening photography, this can be exhausting!) This photograph was made during those essentially middle-of-the-day hours, and the soft light illuminates and colors the 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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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Four Trees, Owens Valley And The Sierra

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Four Trees, Owens Valley And The Sierra
Four Owens Valley trees in evening light, against the shadowed backdrop of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

Four Trees, Owens Valley And The Sierra. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Four Owens Valley trees in evening light, against the shadowed backdrop of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

Our recent travels ultimately took us to Utah, but we began with an obligatory visit to the Eastern Sierra Nevada. It doesn’t really seem like autumn until I have renewed my acquaintance with the autumnal transformation of the aspen trees. I had been up there a week earlier, so this was a shorter visit, but it gave us enough time to do a bit of exploring, visiting some spots that we don’t typically visit.

On our final evening before continuing to the east we decided to do a bit of wandering in Owen’s Valley, and our random ride eventually brought us to this spot just as the last sunlight was coming over the Sierra crest and angling across the Valley. We had headed out this direction for an almost entirely unrelated reason, but once there this row of four trees distracted us, and we quickly worked the light before it was gone. (This was one of those landscape-photography-as-action-photography moments — that shadow line was approaching quickly as I made my exposures, and before long the trees were no longer in the sun.) From this vantage point the immensity and abruptness of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra is clear — the wall of peaks, here embellished with a trace of autumn snow, towers above Owens Valley.

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

Shades of Autumn

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Shades of Autumn
A scene of dense vegetation with fall color, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

Shades of Autumn. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A scene of dense vegetation with fall color, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

On this day I came upon a dense grove of small aspen trees mixed with some autumn-colored mountain willows with their slightly less flamboyant brownish fall color. At the time I arrived the trees were in the shadow of the tall mountains nearby, and the light had a bit of a blue quality. It was also soft and diffused, leading to an absence of very bright highlights and filling the shadows with light, too. The aspen leaves stood out a bit from the background with they yellow color.

Looking for some kind of order and structure in such dense subjects is a challenge, one that forces the photographer to look beyond the obvious ways of seeing. Subtle lines in the dense and complex texture can be enough to direct the eye. Slight contrasts in luminosity or color become important. And the lack of a single strong central subject lets the eye wander about the frame and take in the complexity of the 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.

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.