Category Archives: Photographs: Sierra Nevada

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

Aspen Grove, Late Afternoon

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Aspen Grove, Late Afternoon
Late afternoon light on an Eastern Sierra Nevada autumn aspen grove.

Aspen Grove, Late Afternoon. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late afternoon light on an Eastern Sierra Nevada autumn aspen grove,

Later in the Sierra Nevada aspen color transition many of the groves in this area had already lost their leaves — as you can see if you look towards the more distant trees. But the foreground trees were in that wonderful stage where there are still plenty of colorful leaves, yet enough of them have fallen to more clearly reveal the white aspen trunks. The late-afternoon side light, coming in low over the nearby Sierra crest, helped to make the leaves glow, too.

As I work my way toward the end of this year’s eastern Sierra fall color photography I’m thinking back on the nature of this season. Although the general contours of the color transition are often rather similar from year to year (aside from some of our recent extreme drought years) there are fascinating differences, too. Late in the summer this year I saw a lot of very healthy-looking aspen, probably as a result of two very good water years. That led me to expect that we the colors might be more spectacular than usual. In the end, there was plenty of wonderful color, and I managed to find it in some new-to-me locations… but the transition was unusual and overall not the most spectacular I have seen. It seemed to start a bit early and, to my surprise, in more places than usual I found trees that dropped leaves early. This grove is an example — in a more typical year most of the trees would likely have been in peak color when I made this photograph. No matter… one of the beauties of autumn aspen trees is that there are so many ways to photograph them, and if you don’t get vast groves of wild colors you may find another kind of beauty.

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.

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

Grove Of Small Aspens

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Grove Of Small Aspens
A grove of small aspens with leaves beginning the transition to autumn color.

Grove Of Small Aspens. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A grove of small aspens with leaves beginning the transition to autumn color.

This photograph comes from very early in the annual eastern Sierra Nevada fall color transition. I would typically start my serious aspen color search in California about a week into October, but this year I was out looking during the first week of the month. In truth, you can find earlier color in the Sierra — sometimes due to unusual weather conditions during the past year and sometimes due to anomalous trees in certain places that change earlier than others. This grove of small trees lay in the shadows next to a rocky hill, and the color transition was just beginning.

I want to share a few other factors that crop up in this particular photographic interpretation. When photographing in shadows — as was the case here — the light can be very blue. We face an interesting question about how to deal with that in the post-processing phase. We could leave the image “as the camera saw it,” but because the camera doesn’t see the way we do it may look unusually blue. Or we could tone down the blue in any of several ways — lower the saturation of the blue channel, shift the color balance toward yellow, and so on. Here I did the latter, which is the more typical approach. There’s one other thing going on in the interpretation of this photo that bears mentioning. Various approaches to post-processing might be said to characterize the quality of many photographers’ styles. In this photograph I employed an increasingly common technique — one that I don’t generally use, but which can provide a different “look.” Essentially I softened aspects of the image and then compensated for that by altering other parameters that can produce what I think of as subjective sharpness — contrast, saturation, and adjustments to curves. I won’t give everything away here, but you might look at the photograph and see if you can identify some of what is going on in it.

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.

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

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Last Light, Moraine, Trees

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Last Light, Moraine, Trees
The last evening light touches clouds and a rugged ridge above an old moraine and trees growing on a rocky hill

Last Light, Moraine, Trees. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last evening light touches clouds and a rugged ridge above an old moraine and trees growing on a rocky hill.

When the first seasonal California rains arrive in fall — and snow comes to the Sierra Nevada once again — I’m often still working my way through the archive of photographs from the previous season. As I look back at these (mostly) summer photographs on a day like today, with wind and rain here in Northern California — I often pause to consider how different places like this one are now. When you stop to think of it, what those of us who visit the high peaks in the summer think of as “normal” — those sunny, warm, snow-free days — is actually the exception in a range where it is more likely to be cold and snowy during the majority of the year.


I made this photograph on one of those sunny days around the beginning of September — a fascinating time up there, when it is still the warm season, but when the signs that winter is coming are unmistakeable. After a week of almost universally clear skies, on this evening we had glorious clouds, and everyone was out admiring and photographing the sky and the evening light on peaks. That light is obvious here, but other elements of this scene seemed important to me, too. Those trees on the rocky rise are examples of what we find in this high country — small trees often living in little more than cracks in the rock. And beyond the trees but below the sunlit ridge is a gigantic terminal glacial moraine, one of the biggest I’ve seen in this range.

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.

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

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Intertwined Trunks

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Intertwined Trunks
Tightly laced tree trunks, Southern Sierra Nevada

Intertwined Trunks. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Tightly laced tree trunks, Southern Sierra Nevada.

This photograph took some time to arrive in this form. Originally there were two versions of the subject — one was a vertical format version in black and white while the other was a horizontal format color renditions. (If you look around on my website you should be able to find both of those.) I always liked the abstract flow of the portrait-orientation black and white photograph, but I also liked the unusual coloration in the landscape-orientation color versions. And — duh! — it only took me several years to decide that what I really wanted to do was combine that flow and those colors in this version! Sometimes it is not obvious, at least not to me, how I will ultimately “see” a photograph until quite some time after I push the shutter release button.

The photograph explores something that has long intrigued me about high country trees in the Sierra Nevada. While they are, obviously, living things, they live on time scales that are much longer than we know. Even these “stunted” (to use the common description) high elevations trees, despite their relatively small size, are often many hundreds of years old. As such, they seem to me to occupy an intermediate state between our shorter frame of reference of “living” and the much longer time scale of geology. In some cases the trees take on a character that almost seems closer to that of rock. The colors in the photograph may also warrant some explanation, since they may seem unusual for trees. In typical light, these trees would mostly appear to be a combination of grays and browns, but I these trunks were in deep shade and illuminate by late-day light spilling in from the very blue sky.

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

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

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