Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

Thinking Aloud

Rethinking Social Media

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For many reasons that I will not enumerate here at the current moment, I am pulling back much of my social media presence. I have deleted the content of my Twitter account, and I am in the process of doing the same with material on the META platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

I do not take this step lightly. Over the years (almost decades with Facebook) I have built friendships on these platforms, enjoyed seeing the photography of many colleagues and friends, and learned a lot.

I greatly appreciate the thousands of people who have followed my photography on those platforms, and I’m grateful for their support, friendship, likes, comments, and shares.

A part of me feels badly about what may seem to them like I’m cutting them off. I deeply regret that, but please trust that I have principled reasons for taking these steps.

One follower wrote, “I’ll miss seeing your photographs!” But there’s good news! You don’t have to miss them! You can still see the photographs and descriptions and more and you can comment, too at the following:

Hope you’ll follow me here and/or at one or more of these!

Conservation/Environment, Ideas, Locations, News, Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Southern California, Thinking Aloud

Death Valley on My Mind

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Wash and Alluvial Fan
Morning light on a giant alluvial fan at the base of a desert mountain wash.

Wash and Alluvial Fan. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

Morning light on a gigantic alluvial fan at the base of desert mountains, Death Valley National Park.

This morning I am waking up in a place that is almost literally on the other side of the world from my “home country” of California. As I look out the window from a home in Kosovo toward high mountains at the start the day I am thinking about the storm impacting my state today, and the deserts regions such as Death Valley are especially on my mind as I read reports of tropical storm Hilary.

Our natural impression of places like Death Valley National Park (the part of California’s desert terrain that I know best) is of dryness, heat, aridity… of places where little grows and where challenges human visitors. It isn’t quite that simple, but there is truth to this. Our biggest concerns in such places are often the heat and the scarcity of water.

But I have long been impressed by the fact that there are few locations where the impact of water is more clearly visible than in the desert, especially in the rugged terrain of places like Death Valley. The valley was once a lake. Remnant water from that lake still appears and flows there. The tremendous mountains on either side of the valley were eroded and formed by water, and monumental alluvial fans flow out of side canyons everywhere. Deep watercourses cut through rock, and a close look at stones reveals that they were moved by water.

Even when we recognize the landscape-forming power of water, we still think of the landscape as now being static — formed by forces that worked in the past but now have left a stable geography. A few rocks fall, occasionally a wash overflows and takes out a small section of a road, a playa may fill temporarily with water… but soon everything is back to “normal” as it was.

But this morning it sounds like we may experience much more profound changes as Hilary sweeps though, the sort that occur at intervals measured centuries. Those of us who love this landscape may find our access cut off and that much changes after this storm. I’m both excited by and fearful of these effects — but in any case this is a powerful reminder of the scale of the forces at work in these places we love.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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News, Stories, Thinking Aloud

What I’m Working On Today

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What I'm Working On — 10/22/2018
What I’m Working On Today — 10/22/2018

What I’m Working On Today. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

For fun, today I’m also sharing a little shot of part of my computer screen. It shows several of the threads I’m working on right now. I’m getting close, most likely, to the end of this year’s Eastern Sierra autumn color photographs. (Though western Sierra photography is up and coming right about now.) I’m plunging back into the huge collection of photographs I made as we traveled this past summer — on the screen there are currently photographs from Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, and Heidelberg, with a few other locations yet to come.

But I’m not just working on new photographs — some older work is also on my mind this week. I am a member of a San Francisco night photography collective known as Studio Nocturne. We have a small show right now at Farley’s Coffee in San Francisco, each of us has a piece in the SOMArts exhibit, and our San Francisco ArtSpan 2018 Open Studio is next week at ARCH Supplies in San Francisco. This means printing and mounting and labeling various pieces, including the dark photograph of a Central California donut shop at the top of this window.

And there’s more! I’m also working on a number of prints for Stellar Gallery in the Yosemite Area — some for a new exhibit that is just going up there and some to be sent to collectors who have made recent purchases. No, those aren’t on the screen at the moment… but they will be very soon!

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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 | Twitter | Facebook |
Email

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

Ideas, Thinking Aloud

Improving Your Odds: That’s Why They Call It “Exceptional”

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This is the first of what will be a series of articles looking at steps you can take to improve your chances of producing compelling photographs.

A recent stay in Yosemite Valley during my Yosemite Renaissance artist-in-residency reminded me again that while many aspects of photography are out of our control, there are things we can do to increase the odds of success.

On this visit I had three late April spring days to photograph in the park, which mostly means “in Yosemite Valley” at this time of year when the high country is still snowed in. By non-photography standards, the Valley was beautiful — if a bit crowded.  The sun was out, the sky was blue, temperatures were comfortable, rivers were full of early snowmelt, the waterfalls were flowing, there were hints of green in the seasonal vegetation, and too many tourists were already showing up!

I did the usual things: I got up before dawn to find the early light. I stuck around until the last light faded. I returned to subjects that I knew from past experiences to be promising. I considered where the light would be at different times of day. I went looking for new subjects in likely places. I wandered. I kept my equipment with me at all times.  I made photographs, and some of them are even pretty good, but at times it was hard to “see” something special in these conditions.

What’s not to like, right? From a photographer’s point of view these are not ideal conditions for photography. As pleasant as nice weather is for hiking and camping and picnicking, it can be hard to find exceptional photographs in such everyday light. I and many of my fellow Sierra photographers prefer interesting and unusual conditions — precipitation, broken light, mist and clouds, some haze.

On the final morning I was up and heading into the Valley well before sunrise. The light was unspectacular, with thick overcast cutting off the morning light. But then I caught sight a bit more light in the east, and soon I saw some breaks in the clouds. Within fifteen minutes the conditions opened up and I was treated to an exceptional spectacle of light and clouds and landscape that lasted for several hours, during which I photographed continuously.  I made more interesting photographs during these few hours than during the rest of the visit.

Clearing Clouds, Merced River Canyon
The morning sun breaks through clearing clouds above Merced Canyon

To state the obvious, “exceptional” and “unusual” conditions are not the norm. The blue-sky “blah” light is. If you show up on ten randomly selected days, nine of them are going to be, literally, unexceptional,  and if you are looking for something unusual and beyond-the-norm you aren’t likely to find it.

The basic lesson is simple: The more you are out there the more likely you’ll be out there for something great. Continue reading Improving Your Odds: That’s Why They Call It “Exceptional” →