Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

The Lake, Central Park

December 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Summer boaters on The Lake, Central Park, Manhattan

After watching a friend take on the task of posting a continuous string of black and white photographs during the holiday season this year, I have posted more monochrome photographs than usual, with a number of them coming from a backlog of older work that sits in the raw file archives. This has provided a bit of a necessary nudge to go back and revisit some of those older photographs. I haven’t taken a very systematic approach to this nostalgic review of the older work, instead almost randomly dropping in on the files from different years and subjects. A recent look at some older Sierra Nevada photographs took me back to 2010, and it wasn’t a long trip from there to a collection of photographs from a summer 2010 visit to New York City.

I think that 2010 was the first time I visited New York City in August. New Yorkers are perhaps rolling their eyes, knowing all about August weather there, but I was innocent. Now I know. (And, strange as it seems, I actually chose to go back this past August! I’m starting to get used to it and to perhaps even embrace the heat and humidity.) The Central Park location of this photograph is probably fairly obvious — we wandered through portions of the park and ended up near The Lake, where park visitors rowed slowly and serenely within sight of Manhattan’s urban buildings.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite, Post-processing Workflow

Trees, Granite Slabs, Morning Light

December 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trees scattered along granite slabs are backlit by morning light, Yosemite National Park

I am a complete sucker for scenes with scattered trees, separated enough to allow light to pass, that are backlit by morning or evening sun. Among my photographs, they are a bit of a theme, or so I’ve been told, but they are also almost an icon of the Sierra for me. When I think of the term “range of light,” it is most often this light that comes to mind. I know that I’ve always been intrigued by light that makes the atmosphere glow, is so bright that it is hard to look into it.

Early on this morning I began by making a bee line for this rounded granite ridge at the top of a large system of sloping slabs above the lake where we were camped. Initially I was thinking of the location as a place from which to photograph distant subjects in a different direction, but once at this high point, with the sun spilling brilliant light my direction after having just topped the farther ridge, I turned my attention to these trees and rocks, backed by luminous haze and more granite, tree-covered slopes leading toward a higher ridge.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Cascades, Tuolumne River

December 9, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Tuolumne River crosses cascades past rain-dampened granite to begin its descent into the Tuolumne River Canyon

We had some “interesting” and somewhat surprising weather on this early September back-county Yosemite visit. We were out for nearly ten days, and before hitting the trail many of us had been following long-range weather forecasts. As photographers, we were actually hoping for some “interesting” weather, but nothing appeared to be coming our way. A few days from the end of the trip, as we moved from one location to another, we were surprised to find ourselves under a huge plume of wildfire smoke, which we later found out came from the “Meadow” fire that quickly burned out of control in a somewhat different area of the park.

That evening we were in camp after dark, sitting around and talking and doing the usual camp stuff, when we were completely surprised by a flash of lightning in the sky to our southeast. Since we had not seen anything remotely suggesting rain or thunderstorms earlier in the day we weren’t quite sure what to make of this… but within a short time we started to pick up some rain. Overnight we all had plenty of opportunities to hear rain pattering on the roofs of our tents. When we awoke the next morning, a decent amount of rain had fallen, and there were still clouds around. It turned out that the rains continued off and on through them middle of the day. Between showers we headed out to make photographs, and as one shower approached a couple of us headed back to camp. Topping a ridge on a shortcut route, we had a clear view of the rocky terrain through which the Tuolumne River cascades into the upper Tuolumne Canyon, with the rocks still wet from the rain.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Subalpine Lake and Pinnacles, Afternoon

December 9, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon clouds and light above an eastern Sierra subalpine lake and pinnacles

I am continuing my late 2014 nostalgic return visit to photographs from a 2010 backpack trip into the southern Sierra Nevada with a group of friends, a visit that took us over three very high passes (one over 13,000′) and into some quite remote areas of the Sierra Nevada in Sequoia National Park. For some reason I had sort a number of the photographs behind, sequestered away in raw files where I had not looked at them since that trip. I have some theories about how this came about — I won’t bore readers with all of them, but I do know that sometimes we aren’t quite ready to see photographs for what they really are until some time has passed.

We began our trip at the high Onion Valley trailhead in the eastern Sierra, crossing a familiar first-day pass over the crest and then descending to this beautiful subalpine valley, where short trees grow around rocky lakes that are bordered by a line of rugged and rocky pinnacles that extend back toward the crest. This is a place I have passed through quite often over the years, and since many of the visits were on the first or last day of much longer trips, I think that I may have missed some of the area’s beauty while focused on where I was going next. This time we arrived fairly early on a beautiful afternoon with broken clouds — the kind that suggest the possibility of thunder but then don’t produce it — and the light only became more beautiful as afternoon wore on toward evening.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

The Lake, Central Park

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Trees, Granite Slabs, Morning Light

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Cascades, Tuolumne River

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Subalpine Lake and Pinnacles, Afternoon

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

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