Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Dunes, Blowing Sand

June 1, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dunes with blowing sand in afternoon light, Death Valley National Park

For this photograph I returned to my file on as-yet-unfinished images from this year’s end-of-March visit to Death Valley. We were there for the better part of a week, visiting various areas of the park ranging from some quite popular spots (such as the dunes in this scene) to some that were a bit more off the beaten track and which required some effort to get to. The latter included some abandoned backcountry habitations and some dead-end roads into various canyons.

This scene is a fairly accessible one, though we came at it from a slightly different direction. We also arrived here in conditions that were a bit less than ideal, at least for walking into sand dunes, namely a lot of strong wind and blowing sand. I made the photograph when the sun was a bit lower in the sky, and its back-lit the dust-filled atmosphere and the little ribbons of blowing sand along the top ridges of the dunes.

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Photographs: France, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Urban/Street

La Pierrade, Evening

May 31, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The sidewalk and street in front of La Pierrade, Montmartre, Paris.

I made this photograph on, literally, our first night in France ever. (Yes, we are late-bloomers when it comes to international travel. That’s a long story involving finances, bringing up a family, strong interest in visiting other places, and more.) We had been in London for over a week — not our first visit there — and had arrived in Paris by train in the afternoon, finding out way to our hotel in Montmartre, unpacking, and then deciding it was time to head out and explore. (Here I could tell another funny story on us, involving our discovery that you can get an espresso just about anywhere in this part of Paris, but I’ll save that one for another time, too.)

When we went out we had several goals. One was testing our ability to navigate in a city whose language we do not speak. (It was fine.) Another was to start to get a fix on the surrounding neighborhood. A third, and may be most important, was to find something to eat! That’s hardly a problem in Montmartre, though deciding which place to patronize was challenging. At the intersection where I made this photograph we finally picked one and enjoyed a simple meal outdoors. Whether this is visible in this small online photograph or not is a question, but there are some interesting interactions going on among the people in this nighttime sidewalk scene.

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Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

City Super

May 30, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Busy morning at “City Super” in San Francisco, with produce boxes lined up along the curb

I’ll take a street photography break today, and step away from the Yosemite landscape photography that I’ve been posting almost non-stop. This is a photograph from what I think of as the real Chinatown in San Francisco — a few blocks over from tourist Chinatown, and an area filled with people and markets like this one.

I almost always arrive here on foot, most often after taking the train up the peninsula to the City and then striking out in whatever direction seems interesting, depending on the light and my mood. On this morning I wandered all the way into North Beach before looping back through the area in the photograph.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Stretching The Wings

May 29, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A Ross’s goose raises its wings in a San Joaquin Valley wetland pond

This weekend here in the San Francisco Bay Area it finally truly felt like the start of the summer season — even though the actual start of summer is still a few weeks away. It is hot! The sky is cloudless blue here, unless you head to the coast in the mornings. It is time to go outside in sunlight early in the morning. And by now these geese are somewhere above the Arctic Circle, collected in their remote breeding areas.

I photographed these last winter. I often don’t get this close, but I was already settled into a spot when the flock came to me! A large group landed very close. I remained quiet and still and they came even closer, where I was able to observe them as interacting individuals and not just as the totality of the flock.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Dunes, Blowing Sand

La Pierrade, Evening

City Super

Stretching The Wings

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