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

Creosote, Shadowed Dunes

Image February 3, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Creosote plant in sunlight, backed by shadowed sand dunes.

Sand dune landscapes provide all sorts of surprises. After seeing many photographs of impressive blowing sand and dust storms, you might think that is the norm — but most of the time the dunes are quiet and still. In the daytime there often doesn’t seem to be a lot going on in a visual sense. But go there at the earliest and latest moments of the day, and the light changes so quickly that it is almost impossible to keep up. Here there was only a brief moment when the soft light fell on the dune and the creosote plant and left the further dunes in soft, cool-toned light.

It is common to think of landscape photography as a slow and deliberate process. In fact, at times and with certain subjects it can be, and the photographer may have a lot of time to look and contemplate. But in this edge-of-day light things happen so quickly that photography can become a kind of action sport. The light does something “over there” for a brief moment, but when I look up something new is happening elsewhere. I turn my attention, quickly make a photograph or two, and right away some new combination of form and light emerges. And this whole dynamic show itself only lasts for a short time between midday bright (and often harsh) light and darkness.

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: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Winter Light, San Luis Reservoir

Image February 2, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

High clouds, fog, and brilliant light on a winter day over San Luis Reservoir, California.

Because it lies between the southern San Francisco Bay Area and California’s Great Central Valley — and on the route to many interesting places ranging from the Sierra to Southern California and Death Valley — I have driven past the San Luis Reservoir probably hundreds of times over the years. (I’m old enough to barely recall the area before there was a reservoir, from trips when I was a young child.) Being just another part of the system to transport water in the state, I hardly think of it as one of California’s great scenic wonders.

But in the right conditions and the right light, it becomes difficult to ignore it as a landscape subject. The reservoir is huge and it is surrounded on three sides by mountains. Because of the expansive scale, light can reflect off its surface in ways that mimic what I sometimes see along the Pacific Ocean coast. It also picks up the winter atmosphere, with its fogs and mists, from the Central Valley. And because the road runs more or less along its northern shore, all of this is frequently backlit, as in this photograph that I made in the middle of the day while returning from the Central Valley.

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

Interrupted Dune

Image February 1, 2022 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Interrupted curve of sand at a Death Valley dune.

Sand dunes seem to have very distinct personalities, at least from what I’ve observed in Death Valley National Park and nearby areas. Perhaps counterintuitively, their forms are much more stable than we might imagine, and the changes are mostly superficial. Their unique qualities come from their orientation to the surrounding landscape, how the light strikes them, their tendency (necessarily quite high!) to be in windy areas, the materials that form the sand, the amount of plant life in and around them, and small but persistent features that they hold — peaks, ridges, valleys, twists and turns, hollows, and more.

This was my first visit to the dunes in this photograph. Based on their orientation and the distance to and height of nearby mountains, I had some idea of what the light might be like before I set foot on them. But until I got there I had no idea of the smaller features that could be revealed by changing light. I photographed this beautiful curving pattern in the morning, shortly after the sunlight arrived over the top of a nearby ridge and slanted across the dunes to create the yin-yang pattern of light and shadow along a curve that was surprisingly broken near its lower end.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Winter Trees, Levee Road, Fog

Image January 31, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Tule fog softens the light on a Central Valley levee road winding among winter trees.

My usual inclination when photographing a place like this is to focus on the natural and to exclude the signs of the human presence. It is perhaps ironic that I embrace the human world in my street photography but often obscure it in my other work. I think this comes from the desire to imagine a “natural” work without, well, us. There are fine reasons to do this, but there are also some reasons to not imagine that we are not part of the natural world. (This subject likely deserves and article, a book, a small library — not a two-paragraph post!)

During the winter months I often photograph in California’s Central Valley, attracted by the tule fog and by the migratory birds. And I mostly photograph these subjects as examples of nature. But the Central Valley is anything but a natural wilderness! It is crisscrossed by roads large and small, increasingly filled by towns and cities, and dominated by the agriculture industry. The good news is that those things are interesting photographic subjects, too. This road more or less winds along a levee at the edge of a large pond. I paused here to look back and the way I had come, photographing the road winding through a gentle landscape of tule fog and winter trees.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Creosote, Shadowed Dunes

Winter Light, San Luis Reservoir

Interrupted Dune

Winter Trees, Levee Road, Fog

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