Category Archives: Photographs: Sierra Nevada

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

Aspen Groves, Sierra Crest

November 14, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Aspen groves follow the contours of foothills rising toward the Sierra Nevada crest.

Just for fun… a fall color photography in black and white! I have the greatest respect for our photographer predecessors who set about photographing the beauty of fall color with only monochromatic shades to work with. It can be done, but it isn’t quite as straightforward as photographing fall color with today’s capable digital cameras. It is all too easy to let those colorful leaves end up having monochromatic tones that aren’t that much different from the same trees in the green season! Light helps, as does some selective use of filters — glass filters in the old days and post-processing analogs applied to digital files today.

I made this photograph close to a rather popular fall color photography location, though the exact location isn’t quite in the usual spot. It presented a challenge or two that I won’t describe here. The light was, to use the old euphemism, “interesting” at this point. The late afternoon light was coming in at a low angle and lighting up the trees nicely, but the sky was a bit tricky. Some high clouds were floating over the Sierra crest peaks, and their brightness posed a dynamic range challenge while their shadows fell across the peaks. There are many things I like about this scene — the way the curving forms of the groves lead away and up toward the Sierra crest peak, the long shadows, the alternation of sunlit ridge and darker valleys, and those distant peaks with a bit of autumn snow dusting their summits.

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Trees, Meadow, Autumn Light

November 13, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Every autumn the Sierra Nevada experiences days when the air is full of wildfire smoke. It was only recently that I came to recognize that a large component of what I’ve always identified as “autumn light” is the atmospheric haze from wildfires — not just those nearby in the Sierra, but including the diffused smoke from wildfires further away in California and even beyond California’s borders. Yes, the lower angle light is part of the effect, but it is the soft and hazy atmosphere that is perhaps the most major element. I’m amazed that it took me this long to fully make the connection, but also happy to find there are still new things to “discover” and understand!

The atmospheric light in this photograph is the result of this effect. It was a very smoky day in Yosemite Valley — the sort of day when you might consider wearing a breathing mask. A big fire was still smoldering just south of Yosemite Valley, its smoke collecting each evening and then flowing downwards into the Valley. I made the photograph just as the edge of the shadow from nearby cliffs was beginning to cross this meadow, and the sunlight caused the smokey atmosphere to glow behind the trees. It is easy to think of wildfire smoke as an impediment to photography, but if you turn your thinking around just a bit you soon realize that these conditions can provide some very special and even lovely possibilities, ranging from the muted and slightly sienna tones of the light to enhanced effects of atmospheric recession. The potentials for producing moody and evocative photographs may actually increase on days like this!

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Wildfire Smoke, Forest, Morning

November 12, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning smoke from the Empire fire settings among forest trees in morning light

In today’s post I’m likely to repeat some things that I have shared before, but I think they might provide some context for this photograph of a wildfire that was still burning through forest in the Yosemite National Park Sierra Nevada high country. I have gone through several phases regarding wildfires as a subject. Many years ago, having had my first backcountry experiences in less enlightened part of the Smokey The Bear era, I simply regarded all wildfires as unmitigated disasters. Later I came to understand the obvious: wildfires have always been a part of the natural ecology of forests, and they are necessary for forest health. But I still didn’t like them. After that I began to make an effort to see wildfires and their aftermath as possible subjects for photographs, and even as potential subjects for photographs of something beautiful. For a long time I failed at that, even though I tried. More recently, perhaps because I have been lucky to be in the right places at the right time, I think I have finally begun to understand how to photograph the subject and make it work. (A longer post on that broad subject may be coming before long!)

There have been quite a few wildfires in California this year. (And while I recognize their importance in the natural order of things, I am concerned that the number and extent of the fires is far enough out of the normal range to have some long-term negative effects.) I have had plenty of opportunities to photograph their effects. On this late October morning I was in Yosemite and heading out towards Glacier Point, thinking it might be my final opportunity to photograph there before winter snows close the road for the season. I was stopped in my tracks as I came around a large bend in the road and to a high, open overlook with views toward the Sierra crest. The smoke from the slow-burning late stages of this fire had settled into hollows and among the trees in the still air overnight, and it was just beginning to drift and rise in the early morning light, both softening the scene and emphasizing the varied contours of ridges and forest.

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

Big Leaf Maple And Forest, Autumn

November 11, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Yosemite Valley big leaf maple trees in autumn

I’ll start with a story about crowds, but I’ll end on a better note. :-) I drove to Yosemite Valley on this late-October weekend partially to photograph early fall color in The Valley, but also so that I could attend an exhibit opening at Gallery Five in Oakhurst — where the final showing to the 2017 Yosemite Renaissance exhibit had been installed. I have visited the Valley for years at about this time, since fall colors there typically peak around the end of the month. On this trip, my first indication that I wouldn’t exactly be alone in the park — despite there being a lot of wildfire smoke — was the extraordinarily long line to enter the park, even very early in the morning. Further into the Valley I was stunned by the number of cars and visitors — it wouldn’t have been anything special during the summer, but near the end of October? I decided to head up to the Curry Village (sorry, “Half Dome Village”) area to park where I could wander off and make photographs, but when I arrived there was literally no place to park — not the Village lot, the overflow lot, the nearby roadways, or anything else all the way up to nearby campgrounds. I was floored…

I finally left that area and found a pull-out along the roadway, parked my car near some a portion of the forest filled with colorful big leaf maple and dogwood trees, and headed off into an area where there was virtually no one else around. Yes, there are such places here, even on busy days. As I walked I spotted a number of potential photographs, but I kept going, walking slowly until I finally reached the banks of the Merced River. I made a few photographs there in solitude before turning around and slowly starting back the way I had come. I now had in mind a few trees that I thought might make interesting photographs, so I paused and poked around near them looking for compositions. This photograph falls into a category that I think of as “order from chaos” compositions, in which there is an almost overwhelming amount of detail tied together (I hope!) by some underlying compositional order. Here the darker branches and trunks of trees supply that order underlying the complexity of the colorful big leaf maple leaves.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Groves, Sierra Crest

Trees, Meadow, Autumn Light

Wildfire Smoke, Forest, Morning

Big Leaf Maple And Forest, Autumn

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