Tag Archives: after

Dogwood Leaves, Spring

Dogwood Leaves, Spring - New spring dogwood leaves after morning rain along Crane Flat Road, Yosemite National Park.
New spring dogwood leaves after morning rain along Crane Flat Road, Yosemite National Park.

Dogwood Leaves, Spring. Yosemite National Park, California. June 7, 2009. © Copyright 2009 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

New spring dogwood leaves after morning rain along Crane Flat Road, Yosemite National Park.

There is a grove of dogwood trees along highway 120 into Yosemite, between the park entrance and the valley, where I stop several times each seasons. Most recently I stopped there on a quiet autumn evening this past October when the dogwood leaves were turning fall colors. Much earlier in the season I stop to see and photograph the dogwood flowers. I made this photograph several years ago on my first visit to the grove that season, on a rainy morning when the leaves had emerged and the flowers were in bloom.

While the flowers were the main reason I visited the grove on this morning, it turned out that the flower photographs were less interesting, in some ways, than the photographs I made of the leaves of the dogwood trees and of other newly sprouted plants. Not only where the plants young and fresh and green, but the soft light and the drops of water from the light rain intensified the colors and made the light less harsh.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.

Ivy #1

Ivy #1
Ivy #1

Ivy #1 (After Huntington Witherill). August 7, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Ivy leaves, after Huntington Witherill.

With apologies to and inspired by Huntington Witherill, whose beautiful Photo Synthesis exhibit I saw this past weekend at the Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel, this image is the result of something I played around with yesterday.

I was not previously familiar with Witherill’s photography, neither his “classic” and very beautiful black and white work, nor the more experimental digital work of the Photo Synthesis series. It is all very compelling and tremendously varied work. The exhibit features the digital “manipulations” of flower and other plant subjects. I was fortunate to be able to attend his lecture at the opening of the show, and quite a few things struck me – more than I have time to describe here. As (yet another) photographer with a background in music, I relate to his description of a working process for the Photo Synthesis images that is, in some ways, like jazz improvisation – so I took that route with this image, which I’ll simply describe as an experiment for now. It was also fascinating to watch his animations of the sequence of steps that his source images underwent as they progressed to become the final images. I also like the way he embraces the concept of what I think of as “photographic art” without getting too hung up about whether the result is a photograph or something else. I also was intrigued by (hoping I say this in a way that makes sense and doesn’t accidentally sound offensive) the fact that he is so close to some sort of “edge” with these images that some are incredibly beautiful while a few push a boundary that I’m not quite ready to cross.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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