Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Redwood National & State Parks

Wall of Redwoods

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Wall of Redwoods
A dense grove of closely-spaced coast redwood trees, Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Wall of Redwoods. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A dense grove of closely-spaced coast redwood trees, Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

This dense “wall”of redwood trees is part of a grove at Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Northern California. Our experience of arriving in the grove was quite striking. We had just spent hours driving a long loop of small country roads out to part of the “Lost Coast” area, and after a somewhat steep descent the road dropped into this deep, dark, and quiet grove. We stepped out of the car into the cathedral-like experience of these incredibly large trees and paused here on our drive for some time, wandering slowly among the trees and making photographs.

I’ve written before about how photographing in the redwood forest presents a number of challenges. Some of them are objective — it is very dark here, even in the middle of the day in many cases, and one ends up using very long exposures, sometimes adding up to several seconds. And despite the sense of stillness, it seems that there is always a tiny bit of air movement that affects branches and leaves. But a more complex question is how to render photographs of these places. What the camera records here is quite different than what the eye and the mind see. For some technical reasons I’ve written about previously, while the eye sees rich and deep colors, the camera records something that can appear flatter and dimmer. So the post-processing question always becomes how to move things back toward the light and colors that we remember experiencing. When doing that it is easy to get carried away and perhaps create something that is a bit too much of a fantasy — there’s nothing objectively wrong with that, but the question of how far to go is never far away. I chose here to stick with a rather dark rendition, since I remember that this is how the scene felt to me at the time.

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: Germany, Photographs: Travel, Photographs: Urban/Street

Stolpersteine, Heidelberg

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Stolpersteine, Heidelberg
Sidewalk memorials to the memory of German Jews who were victims the Holocaust.

Stolpersteine, Heidelberg. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Sidewalk memorials to the memory of German Jews who were victims the Holocaust.

This photograph has been sitting on my computer for several months now, and I have been debating when and how to post it. It isn’t “the usual thing” for me to post, but there you go. I’m not an expert on the Stolpersteine (wikipedia says “literally ‘stumbling stone,” metaphorically ‘stumbling block’.”) so I’m relying on some material I have found online plus some context provided to me by people I know who live in the areas where they are found. (You can read more about them here, including some of the controversies about their installation.) In front of homes, shops, all kinds of buildings you fine these plates indicating that “Here lived…” a specific person who was deported or killed in the Holocaust, thus de-anonymizing the effects of that horror and tying it closely to places where people seem to live normal lives today.

One reason I have been thinking about the Stolpersteine is that here in the US we have been engaging in a (sometimes absurd) debate about how to best recognize and come to terms with very difficult and awful parts of the history of our great country, in particular the enslavement of Africans and the long and ongoing oppression of people of color. An element of this has been the call to remove monuments to slavers and traitors who fought a war agains this country. The counter cry is “Don’t take our history away.” The history should, of course, remain and be readily visible and available. But glorifying the perpetrators of that history is another matter entirely. It might not be a bad idea to have our own version of the “stumbling stones,” perhaps marking the places where enslaved people were sold, where post-Civil War atrocities took place, 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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Young Forest

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Young Forest
A dense forest of small trees, likely in an old logging tract, Northern California.

Young Forest. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A dense forest of small trees, likely in an old logging tract, Northern California.

As I described in a previous post, in early June we spent a day driving a somewhat less-travelled loop in far Northern California, a route the took us west from US 101 and out to the “Lost Coast” before heading south along a stretch of lonely beach and then turning inland. From there the route took us through coastal hills and valleys, though small hamlets, and past the ubiquitous marijuana farms before climbing a tall ridge and then dropping steeply into a dark and quiet redwood forest not far from our return route along US 101.

The first portion of this look was quite varied and different from what I expected. I only knew that it was a narrow, winding road with a somewhat dubious surface, and that it would eventually take us to the coast. But I had no idea of what terrain we’d cover or what sorts of vegetation we would see. Although the route starts near a coastal plain featuring farmland, it soon climbed into tree-covered hills, occasionally emerging into open meadows that sometimes afforded expansive views. At times the road was quite steep — it is not the sort of gentle route that tries to avoid steep grades. At one point we descended from a high open area and were surprised to find ourselves in this forest of small trees, moss, and ferns.

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: Ocean & Coast

Dark Headland, Big Sur Coast

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A dark headland cliff rises directly above the Pacific along the Big Sur coast as fog clears from distant mountains.

Dark Headland, Big Sur Coast. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A dark headland cliff rises directly above the Pacific along the Big Sur coast as fog clears from distant mountains.

Recently we spent some time photographing along the far Northern California coast. One thing leads to another, and before long I found myself looking back through raw file archives from previous coastal photography, including subjects from up and down the entire coast of the state. One set of older files came from a one-day jaunt about halfway down the Big Sur coast on a day when the weather was shifting from clear and sunny to windier and (potentially) wetter as a large Pacific front was working its way down the coast.

The light was quite amazing on this day. Although clouds were approaching from the north (behind my camera position in this photograph), to the south it was still quite sunny — so bright, in fact, that it was hard to look directly at the surface of the ocean here. At the same time the morning coastal fog was thinning and drifting away from the mountains as they curved to the south and southeast. I made several photographs from this spot, all of them featuring the tall and steep dark headland in the foreground. In this one I opened up the scene a bit wider to include the curving sweep on the coastline as it continued to the south.

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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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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