Category Archives: Photographs: Northern California

Photographs from Northern California

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Point Sur

July 7, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Pacific Ocean surf at the Point Sur Lighthouse near the mouth of the Little Sur River.

Point Sur is a dramatic landmark along the Big Sur coastline of California south of the Monterey area, standing apart from the main land mass and attached to it by a low peninsula with sand dunes and a beach facing north toward the Pacific. Virtually every time I have passed by here the wind has been howling, often kicking up clouds of ocean spray, or else it has been fogged in. The lighthouse itself sits near the right end of the point, as seen in this photograph, with other buildings along the highest ridge. I have yet to visit the historic structure, but I often stop along this section of the coast and try to photograph the point.

I made this photograph on a winter day when those strong winds were blowing and the winter seas were battering the north facing beach. This time I looked for a higher vantage point that would show the line of surf approaching the beach and include the silhouette of the coastal hills and bluffs at the edge of the sea. This image languished in my archive for nearly half a year before I returned to this set of images and saw that it could work in a monochrome rendition, and that this might even be a more dramatic way to show this scene.

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.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Coastal Ranch, Fog

July 6, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Fog bank above a coastal ranch in a meadow along the Pacific Coast Highway

This little meadow, filled with yellow flowers, is in the upper section of the Big Sur coast of California, where I made a very quick trip early on the morning of the Fourth of July — there and back again before most of the holiday traffic arrived. (That traffic was completely jamming all of the area roads heading the opposite direction as I returned home.)

I was a beautiful and relative quiet early morning, with low fog hugging the coast and providing a welcome contrast to the much warmer inland weather. It also was the sort of day — foggy, with bright wildflowers — that can make a Californian temporarily forget this year’s serious drought. This ranch building sits just off the main highway at the base of a couple of small valleys leading up into the coastal mountains.

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: San Francisco

Five Ships, Abandoned Piers

July 3, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Five ships sit at anchor beyond abandoned piers, San Francisco Bay

This will likely be the final in this series of (mostly) black and white photographs featuring this dilapidated pier (piers, actually) along the San Francisco waterfront in the China Basin area. I’ve shared several others recently, but yesterday as I was preparing some prints for a meet-up with some fellow photographers in San Francisco, I took another look at this one and saw that it could work with a more panoramic format.

The ships parked on the horizon probably don’t suggest San Francisco to most people, but it is very common to see them moored out in the San Francisco Bay, where I imagine that they must “park” before or after being offloaded. Quite a few seem to be tankers of some sort. I’ve been intrigued by these ships for some time, and the linear arrangement of five of them on this morning, when fog and backlight made the hills on the other side of the Bay disappear, almost seems a bit mysterious. The piers are also fascinating. They have obviously been there for a long time and just as obviously have been allowed to deteriorate to the point that portions seem to have simply fallen into the water, and it looks like the Bay will ultimately reclaim all of them.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

July 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Motion blur abstraction of a winter scene with three birds landing

Near the end of the day, well along into the dusk hour, with light fading fast, I decided to take advantage of the poor light and “play” a bit with very slow shutter speeds and intentional camera motion. By moving the camera in various ways during the exposure I can control to some extent the angle, length, and linearity of the blur. In some cases it is enough to just track the birds — and give the less fuzzy image of the three central birds, I am pretty certain that is what I was doing here. In other cases I can basically ignore the motion of my subjects and simply think about how to move the camera to create patterns in the motion blur.

I’ve often felt that working for sharply focused, stopped motion images of birds is not the only way to depict whatever it is that attracts me to them. The camera lets us see birds in ways that we really cannot usually see them with our own eyes. When birds are in motion it is almost impossible — at least with many types of birds — to clearly see them. They move too fast and the motion of wings is essentially impossible to track visually. And when we do stop them with a fast shutter speed, while we get to see them with a kind of clarity that isn’t otherwise possible, we may also sacrifice that sense of constant motion. So I started playing with the idea of intentionally avoiding sharp focus, allowing camera motion to come into play and using slow shutter speeds to allow the birds to blur and to blur their surroundings as the camera moves. To me, this sometimes evokes more strongly the feeling of the fast motion that I observe among these birds, and creates a different sort of honest portrayal of them.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Northern California

Point Sur

Coastal Ranch, Fog

Five Ships, Abandoned Piers

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.