Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Fall Aspen Color, Boulder Mountain

April 16, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Brilliant autumn aspen color on Boulder Mountain, Utah

I produced a lot of photographs in the state of Utah in 2012. Although I had not photographed there before (as astonishing of an omission as that seems!) I think I did a pretty good job of making up for lost time. I made three visits to the state, one in spring and two in the fall, and spent a total of about 35 days on the road to, from, and within Utah. I plan to go back!

On that first spring visit we drove over the shoulder of Boulder Mountain between the Escalante and Torrey areas before the new spring foliage had yet come to the extensive aspen groves found in that area. Being an aspen aficionado I could imagine what these slopes must be like in the fall when the foliage changes, and we made a plan to try to pass by here again in the autumn. Not being completely familiar with the seasonal patterns in this part of the country, we might have been just a bit late for peak Utah color – in general we saw brilliant aspen color in many places, but it had already passed at the higher locations, and we soon learned that the cottonwood color comes a bit later in the month. So when we left the town of Boulder to follow the road up and over the Boulder Mountain area, we had a combination of some brilliantly colorful groves at the lower and perhaps middle elevations and higher groves that had more or less completely dropped their leaves. That is the scene in this photograph, made in early evening light on a day when there were some high clouds – and the shockingly colorful foreground trees are backed by the bare trunks of winter aspens higher up the slopes of the mountain.

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

Diablo Range, Winter Sunset

April 15, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Colorful winter sunset over the Diablo Range, seen from California’s San Joaquin Valley

It is rare for me to shoot a scene quite like this one, with the setting sun included in the frame. It was a sort of spontaneous thing. I had a very long lens on the camera since I was photographing geese and cranes in the evening light, and when I looked up and saw that the sun was setting right in the low point on the ridge of the Diablo Range I quickly grabbed my tripod and made a few exposures of this scene.

This time right around and just after sunset is what I think of as the magic hour here in this Valley between the Sierra and the Diablo Range. Much of the pre-sunset coming and going of the geese pauses and things seem to slow down. The wild color was only there for a brief moment, and only in this specific part of the sky right above the setting sun, where the low light reflected off the bottom of a high, thin cloud layer. A single bird (perhaps a hawk? is in the upper branches of the tree at far left, and some light reflects off of the surface of the ponds at this wildlife refuge.

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

Four Ross’s Geese, Sunset Light

April 14, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Four Ross’s geese in flight against the sky in sunset light

I photographed this group of Ross’s geese late in the day, just as golden hour light was beginning to intensify. We had spent the day in the San Joaquin Valley, visiting a couple of wildlife refuges, and returned at the end of the day to the place where we had begun shooting before dawn. We hoped for some combination of evening geese and then a dusk fly-in of sandhill cranes.

The amount of control you have when photographing these birds is minimal. It is up to them to decide where they will settle in, when and in what direction they will fly, and much more. A lot of the process involves doing things that you hope will increase your odds – being in likely spots at likely times, and so forth – then being ready to take advantage of whatever comes your way. The latter requires some sensitivity to how things are developing, some experience with the camera so that you can make decisions quickly and track flying birds that may turn up unexpectedly, and more. The situation with the geese on this evening was a bit unusual, at least in my experience. At this place we have often been able to find very large flocks of the birds late in the day, at which point a reasonable strategy is to position yourself nearby, taking into consideration the direction of the light, possible backgrounds, and the paths they will likely fly. Then you wait, ready to photograph, until the birds decide to do what birds decide to do! With luck, they will lift off in interesting groups, against interesting backdrops, and in good light. On this evening, we were only able to find one relatively small group of Ross’s geese. (We saw other much larger groups in the area, but they were further off and in places inaccessible to us.) So we found out spot nearby and waited, photographing very small groups of them as they lifted off and flow to the north. However, a few groups did an extra loop or two around us, coming back over our position quite low. You never know how the birds will line up, and often they will ether be too separated from one another or else they are so tightly clustered that you get blocked heads or wings that cover other birds. However, this group was polite enough to line themselves up in such a way that as they flew past each of them was completely visible in the evening light.

Commentary, History, Photographers

“Philip Hyde Books” – Q.T. Luong

April 13, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Q.T. Luong has shared an insightful and well-written tribute to photographer Philip Hyde: Philip Hyde Books.

Philip Hyde has been described as one of the most important members of the mid-to-late twentieth-century generation of American landscape photographers – in Luong’s article he is described as being a member of a trinity that includes Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. Of the three, Hyde is the least known – perhaps not so much because his work wasn’t seen but, rather, because it was often seen in the service of other things, mostly environmental causes. His son, David Leland Hyde, who carries on his father’s legacy, has said that his father may have regarded the value his photographs had in the campaign to keep two dams out of Grand Canyon National Park to be his greatest success – not a bad legacy, I’d say!

Hyde’s work was featured in the early Sierra Club “coffee table books” on environmental and wilderness subjects. Today, even as role of actual books fades and online imagery (in some ways, unfortunately) increases, we still take these sorts of books for granted, and we perhaps forget just how important they were. How many of use had our first profound experience with the power of photographs through these books? I know that I and many others who began doing photography during the latter half of the 1900s certainly did. In his article, Luong acknowledges that he formed much of is own orientation to photography before he knew about Hyde, but he also acknowledges an affinity he feels for Hyde’s work. This is no accident. The influence of Hyde’s way of seeing the natural world has, I am certain, affected many photographers (and others) who are unaware of the source of this influence – precisely because the effect of his work and of the books through which it was shared was so widespread and pervasive.

I know that I saw Hyde’s work when I was much younger. I worked in a book store for some years and managed to purchase just about any Sierra Club book that we had on the shelves. But I’m afraid that I didn’t connect what I saw to Hyde himself at that time, though the power of the photographs certainly affected me. When I first photographed in the Sierra and elsewhere in California, it was these images (along with those of Adams and Porter and Weston and others) that I held in mind as a model of what I wanted my photographs to do.

A few years ago I stopped at the Mono Lake visitor center and wandered into a side room where there is a small (and, unfortunately, somewhat neglected) gallery of photographs. Among the images in this gallery are several of Hyde’s photographs. As I looked at them, I “saw” them for the first time and recognized a source of the way of seeing that is pervasive in the work of so many who photograph the natural world. (Needless to say, I now visit that little gallery almost every time I’m near Mono Lake.)

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Fall Aspen Color, Boulder Mountain

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Diablo Range, Winter Sunset

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“Philip Hyde Books” – Q.T. Luong

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

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