Hilltop Oak Grove. Calero Hills, California. November 23, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell
Category Archives: Photographs: Nature
Autumn Dogwood Leaves, Yosemite Valley
Autumn Dogwood Leaves, Yosemite Valley. Yosemite National Park, California. November 4, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell
Branches and Clouds, Merced River
Branches and Clouds, Merced River. Yosemite National Park, California. November 4, 2007. © Copyright 2007 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Branches and clouds reflected in the surface of the Merced River
This photograph was taken along the shore of the Merced River near the “housekeeping” camp along the south side of the Valley. I had wandered over here to photograph a tree on the opposite bank that had dropped an interesting bunch of colorful leaves. (That photograph turned out to be, I’ll be honest, boring… ;-) As I got ready to take down the tripod and leave I noticed this interesting bunch of partially submerged branches along the waterline.
I recently (May 2015) reworked this photograph, and I like the newer interpretation quite a bit more than the original. Here there are “three worlds” in the photograph — the solid material of the branches and their crisp reflections in the water, the barely visible branches beneath the water’s surface, and the very light reflections of sky and thing clouds.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Ferns, Burned Forest
Ferns, Burned Forest. Yosemite National Park, California. November 3, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
Spending a lot of time in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and elsewhere, my point of view regarding wildfires has changed since I was younger. Leaving aside for a moment the possible human cost when a fire overruns homes and other structures, wildfires are a normal part of the forest ecology, and suppressing them has actually caused a number of problems. Once I started to think of wild fires as something part of the natural process and not as disasters I became interested in how I might photograph forests that had been burned.
For the most part I’ve been unsuccessful in creating such images, but I like this one. Many of my previous attempts have focused on the image of forests of burned tree trunks, sometimes with new growth starting below, or on the hillsides laid bare by fire, or on the new growth itself. This is a more intimate view of a fire zone than I’ve tried before – and I feel like it works even more in the larger versions of the image that are not posted here.