Category Archives: Photographs: Southern California

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: People In Landscape, Photographs: Photographers, Photographs: Southern California

Three Photographers, Dunes And Mountains

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Three Photographers, Dunes And Mountains
Three photographers working the morning light atop a sand dune ridge, with desert mountains byond.

Three Photographers, Dunes And Mountains. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Three photographers working the morning light atop a sand dune ridge, with desert mountains byond.

Five of us went out together to photograph in the dunes on this morning. It was only after I arrived in Death Valley that I discovered that a group of photographers and friends was down from the Yosemite area and camped nearby. We made a loose plan to meet up the next morning before sunrise and head out into the darkness early enough to be well into the dunes before the first good light arrived.

We made it out there and went to work, photographing in the predawn light, then as the sun came up, and continuing until the light began to lose its early hour magic. One fun thing about photographing with other photographers is that when things slow down a bit… we sometimes make photographs of one another! A side benefit of this is that almost all of us have in our collections photographs of some pretty interesting and talented people, and a second benefit is that sometimes they share photographs they made of us. Here my three friends are set up on the spine of a dune, working the early morning light against a backdrop of tall desert mountains.

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

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Hikers, Desert Canyon

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Hikers, Desert Canyon
Two hikers entering the narrows of Titus Canyon

Hikers, Desert Canyon. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two hikers entering the narrows of Titus Canyon.

The stream beds of desert washes often seem to me to be the “freeways” of the desert. They can (but not always!) provide relatively easy walking through rougher terrain. The periodic flow of water, along with the mud and rocks caught in its flow, both clears the washes of vegetation and leaves a relatively flat surface of small stones and dried sediment. Over millennia the water flowing through the washes does the hard word of trail building, wearing down obstructions and leveling out the rough places. (OK, there are exceptions — those chock stones that fall into canyons and block them, along with the periodic “dry falls” that may be unsurmountable.)

This canyon is often used by motor vehicle traffic, but following heavy rains that made the route impassable to vehicles it turned into a much more pleasant place to hike, and a group of us walked up through the spectacular narrows in its lower reaches. Lower in the canyon it is sometimes quite narrow, though in this location it begins to broaden a bit. To understand the scale of the terrain look closely and you’ll be able to spot a couple of hikers.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Wildflower Fields, Carrizo Plain

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Wildflower Fields, Carrizo Plain
Yellow and purple wildflowers from plain to hills, Carrizo Hills National Monument

Wildflower Fields, Carrizo Plain. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Yellow and purple wildflowers from plain to hills, Carrizo Hills National Monument.

This is a straight up “look at all the flowers!” photograph, made just before the seasonal peak of the bloom in the Carrizo Plain. Something like this happens in many places in California that seem almost desert-like during most of the year. Once winter rains start (and if it isn’t a drought year…) there is sudden appearance of new plant life in the middle of winter, and these dry places start to turn green. The process continues until some point in March, during what I like to call the “impossibly green season,” when whole hillsides become greener than you might imagine. Then there is a brief period in late March and into April, before the grasses again go dormant, when wildflowers may appear in abundance.

If you visited this location during most of the year you would likely describe it as a very dry and hot place, and you might even be tempted to regard it as desert. But when I visited this year and extensive spring bloom was just getting underway. I photographed from just about the lowest point in a wide valley, at the edge of a dense field of yellow flowers. Beyond, the yellow flowers transitioned to equally dense fields of purple flowers. Then the yellow resumed and extend right on up the slopes of the distant mountains.

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.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Dusk Dunes

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Dusk Dunes
Soft evening light on low sand dunes

Dusk Dunes. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Soft evening light on low sand dunes.

Sand dunes are perhaps the most classic “desert” photography subject. For most people, they are their first association with these places, and their dry, bare (or so it seems), and utterly dry features are some combination of beautiful, intriguing, and dangerous. I am certainly not immune to their appeal, and photographing them can be an endlessly challenging activity. One reason is that as photographic subjects they are much more varied than you might initially imagine. While they have their own shapes and colors, these are changed radically by wind, color and intensity of light, and more. They provide one other challenge, too — when I first look at them it always seems like they will be easy to photograph, but they always end up presenting more challenges than I expected.

I love photographing dunes in the marginal light at the start and end of the day, and especially the time right around and just after sunset. At these times the dunes undergo sometimes-astonishing color transformations. The warmer tones, which are sometimes sun-blasted into neutrality during the day, begin to emerge in the softer light. And the dunes pick and reflect a wide variety of colors — blue from darker sky; reds, yellows, and even purple from sunset clouds. I photographed these smaller dune formations from a distance in the early evening.

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.