Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: Travel

Land’s End, December Mist

Image August 5, 2021 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

December fog and light along the Pacific Coast Highway, Big Sur.

This was a wild and unusual early-December morning along the Big Sur coast. I drove down early on a crisp and clear morning, having heard that the surf might by quite large. Below Carmel I began to see the evidence — first the low coastal fog that rises above the surf on such mornings and soon the actual waves. I continued south, stopping at various points along the way to photograph into the fog and the raging surf.

This kind of fog has several special characteristics. When the sun is behind it, as it is in the morning along this section of the coastline, the hazy atmosphere glows magically. The intensity of this glow, combined with the opacity of fog, drains the colors from the scene, and in places the world looks almost monochromatic. This fog, being thin, still allows fairly long views, though most of the fine details of the landscape are invisible, leaving the larger features to become more apparent. In this location the Pacific Coast Highway runs precipitously along the edge of steep cliffs over the ocean, and the rugged coastline breaks apart into cliffs and sea stacks.

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, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Point Sur, December Sky

Image August 4, 2021 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

High clouds, brilliant reflecting light on the water, and fog at Point Sur.

There is a lot of “accepted wisdom” about photography that turns out to be not quite true when you stop and consider your actual picture-making experience..Yesterday I was having a conversation with a photographer friend (Hi, Charlie!) about various things, including the way that some photographs don’t quite make sense to us until we return to them long after making the original exposure. If one ideal is to pre-visualize the photograph perfectly (and I do believe in the value of pre-visualizing), then it would seem that being surprised months or years later to find that a forgotten image works is hard to explain. But it happens — quite a lot, actually. One of my ideas about this is that at first we are too invested in what we believe the photograph to be that we are unable to look beyond that and see what it actually is.

All of this is a long way of getting to a point about this photograph. When I first viewed it right after the day I visited the Big Sur coast, I had a hard time with certain aspects of the light and the color and, to a lesser extent, the way it was framed. Originally I settled on a black and white interpretation. (Yes, a neat way of copping out about the color issues!) Recently I went back and looked at it again, and this is the result. I ended up with a slightly different crop, some work to lighten portions of the scene, and some new thinking about color of clouds and sky and about how to handle the bright yet low contrast reflections on the water out near the horizon.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Eastern Sierra Lake, Evening

Image August 3, 2021 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early evening light on a high country Sierra Nevada lake in the Hoover Wilderness.

A few weeks ago I decided to head to the eastern Sierra for a few days to get up into the high country. The main idea was to do a sort of pre-flight check for some potential backpacking, but I was also interested in photography, of course. I ended up camping at the end of an east side road that departs US 395 north of Yosemite. Despite the number of wildfires in California, I was lucky and the winds blew the right way to give me mostly clear skies. On this afternoon I decided to just hike up into the drainage above the road end to see what I would find.

Because I was looking for late-day light I didn’t start up the trail until mid-afternoon — my plan was to arrive at the high point when the light was getting good, make photographs, and then return by nightfall. After many years of hiking such terrain, this route felt familiar even though it was my first time on this trail. I passed a lake, following a trail through trees along its shoreline, and then climbed again, crossing a rocky ridge before another lake came into view. Eventually I came to my favorite sort of Sierra landscape — flat, meadowy areas with glaciated granite and small trees, with water flowing and peaks above. I stopped hiking and just sat for a while, enjoying the solitude and quiet… and noting that it was starting to get a bit cold. Eventually I made a few photographs and started back down the way I came, pausing to photograph a small peninsula at this lake as the angle of the light lowered.

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Photographs: People In Landscape, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Hot Shower $5.00

Image August 2, 2021 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An inviting sign on a door at a trailhead packstation in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.

I have been a Sierra backpacker for a long time. How long, you ask? A significant number of decades. My first backpacking trip, something I had dreamed about for a few years, was the summer I turned 16. Two buddies and I headed off into the Desolation Wilderness for something like five days. Unsupervised. (I still cannot believe that my parents allowed this.) Both friends had at least some backcountry experience, one with his family and one in the Boy Scouts. But this was all entirely new to me.

Often we think of the peak moments in the backcountry, the astonishing sunrises, climbing to the summit of a peak, and encounter with wildlife, visiting a place to which few others have been. Or perhaps we tell “hero stories” — the time I took a five day pack trip with a broken toe, my first solo (two weeks long), bad weather, getting lost. But the truth is that a lot of the experience is based on some pretty simple pleasures: sitting on a comfortable rock as the day ends, eating that freeze-dried food out of the pot, traveling for days with friends… and that shower at the trailhead when you return from a week or more in the backcountry.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Land’s End, December Mist

Point Sur, December Sky

Eastern Sierra Lake, Evening

Hot Shower $5.00

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