Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Scotland, Photographs: Travel

Old Trees, Stone Fence

Image July 14, 2024 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

From years of hiking in California and backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, I’m familiar with hiking in wilderness terrain. In those places the signs of human visitors are mostly subtle: a cleared area where people have camped, trails, blaze marks on trees, and occasional rustic dam raising a lake’s water level by a few feet. The experience is very different along Scotland’s Great Glen Way, the 80 mile trail between Fort William and Inverness. Here the marks of human presence are almost constantly visible. It isn’t all bad — each evening we stayed in nice lodging and ate great meals!

I made the photograph on the final day of our weeklong walk. We had assumed that it would be an easy day, since it would bring us to our final destination, it didn’t cross any high mountains, and it seemed (in a somewhat misleading way) to be short. We started in pasture-land and then entered forest… as the rain began. It continued for hours, all the way into Inverness. Here the route skirted a private forest (see the barbed wire!) lined with a very old, moss-covered rock wall.

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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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Forest, Fog, Soft Light

Image July 13, 2024 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

It isn’t news that California and the West have been suffering under an extreme and long-lasting heat wave. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been bad — though clearly it is much worse in other locations. This week I finally had enough, and I drove over the hills to the coast early in the morning to seek out fog. I found it! In fact, it was so thick on the coast (where the temperature was a blessed 55 degrees) that it interfered with my intended photography. So I followed side roads that took me inland to the edge of the fog, where soft light was starting to illuminate the landscape.

By most measures, this is a rather nondescript location. (I actually parked in from of a CalFire Station.) But across the small valley, trees led up the hillside, catching the soft light that was just barely penetrating the fog. There’s an additional detail here: A large wildfire swept through a few years back, denuding the landscape in many places. These trees at the bottom of the valley were spared, but you can see skeleton of dead trees on top of the ridge.

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Photographs: Scotland, Photographs: Travel

New Town, Edinburgh

Image July 12, 2024 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This photograph overlooks the section of Edinburgh, Scotland known as “New Town.” To an American visitor, who might think a town is “old” if it has been around for a couple of centuries, it might be surprising to find out that New Town arose (next to the much older Old Town) roughly 250 years ago. In places with such deep history, 250 years is not that long! New Town features a lot of fascinating Neo-Classical and Georgian architecture and, in fact, it does seem a lot newer than the “Old Town” near Edinburgh Castle.

Speaking of the Castle, that is my camera position for this photograph — the foreground structures are part of it. The castle is on the top of an imposing ridge and its summit provides expansive views. Here we look across New Town to the shores of the Firth of Forth and then to more distant areas of Scotland across the water.

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Photographs: Italy, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Four Mailboxes

Image July 11, 2024 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

When we travel we do seek out some of the famous, must-see places and things — castles, cathedrals, geological features, markets, and all the rest. But we also like to engage in a certain amount of random wandering when we can. In some ways this gives me a better sense of the character of a place than I would get by checking off all of the Big Important Things. (Don’t get me wrong. Many of those are important with good reason and are well worth visiting.) I made this photograph on one of these wandering days.

We often start out with a very general goal or idea in mind, but what we do along the way is often fairly unplanned. That was the case on this day in Orvieto, a lovely Italian hill town. Being constrained by its location on the relatively flat top of a hill, the place isn’t huge, and you can cover most of it easily on foot. So we were out walking, poking our heads into narrow alleys, looking for interesting buildings, and photographing any little bits of local character we found.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Old Trees, Stone Fence

Forest, Fog, Soft Light

New Town, Edinburgh

Four Mailboxes

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