Brick walls and windows along a London street, late afternoon
There is probably not a whole lot to write about this photograph. As we walked some London streets that were not quite as filled with tourists, I looked up this side street and saw the beautiful series of brick walls, with all sorts of interesting interruptions of the basic form: windows, an indented darker area housing windows, conduit and a lamp, etc. Between the darker bricks further along the wall and the shadow near the camera position, there was a brighter band of sunlit bricks.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Hazy autumn afternoon light on golden cottonwood trees growing along the banks of the Merced River, Yosemite Valley
As I try to do every fall, I visited Yosemite Valley for a few days right at the end of October so that I could photograph fall color and other seasonal subjects. I typically target my visits for near the end of the last week of the month, since at about this time the cottonwood, big leaf maple, black oak, and dogwood trees can produce beautiful colors and the meadows turn wonderful shades of tan and brown and gold. There are other benefits to visiting at this time of year, too – far fewer people, cooler temperatures, availability of campsites, and I often run into friends and other interesting people in the Valley.
I’m a big fan of backlit trees, and I have shot in this area of meadows and cottonwood trees and river bank many times before. In the afternoon the light begins to come into the valley from the low sun in the west and while trees can be backlit, some of the granite cliffs are already in shadow. If there is a bit of atmospheric haze, I like it even more! On this afternoon I decided to poke around along the banks of the Merced in this area where it flows through a series of bends among meadows and forest – and there were backlit cottonwood trees galore to work with!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Three dead snags on a small ledge catch the late afternoon light at the base of a huge, shadowed cliff of crumbling granite.
I returned to the area near this cliff face almost daily during our mid-September photography trip to this region of the Kings Canyon National Park back-country. The area was rich with photographic subjects – sub-alpine ponds and larger lakes, late summer golden meadows, granite slabs and boulders, individual trees and forest, the surrounding slopes and cliffs, and the summits of ridges and peaks beyond. We photographed here morning and evening, and in sun and rain and clouds. Although we were in the area of almost a full week, we could easily return for another week and find plenty more to photograph.
This rugged and broken bit of cliff face had intrigued me before I thought to photograph it this way. It rose above the far end of the largest lake in this area, with talus slopes at its base and a higher ridge above. Beyond it other faces and slopes rose into a higher valley that was topped with very high and fractured ridge. At this late time in the summer season, the face was in shade in both the early morning and evening hours, with only some areas struck by light slanting across from one side or the other. While looking at the face I noticed a small group of three bare snags standing in the sun at the lower right and though that I might be able to contrast them with the larger rocky face, and include them as a way to suggest the large scale of the cliffs. The blue tones are, of course, because the rocks are in shadow, though some reflected light adds a glow to some of the rocks facing toward the left. This photograph may be a bit difficult to make sense of at a small web size, but my intention is to print it very large so that the details will be more visible.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Raindrops from a late afternoon shower mark the surface of a small Sierra Nevada pond reflecting the sky
During our mid-September photographic sojourn to the back-country of Kings Canyon National Park, the four photographers in my group were blessed with a wide range of weather conditions. The weather was never difficult or bad, but we did get precipitation on something like five of the 9 days we were on the trail. This constitutes what I might describe as “interesting” weather – clouds, some showers, a bit of wind, occasional mist around the peaks, but nothing dangerous or wild enough to interfere with photography and confine us to tents. (Although we missed it, if we had stayed a couple of days longer we might well have added snow to the experience!) From my perspective, and I’m sure that I share this view with most Sierra photographers, the thing we perhaps dread most is encountering one of those weeks-long bouts of perfect blue sky boring weather. Give us some clouds and a bit of rain!
While it is possible to encounter the first Pacific weather fronts of the season at about the time we were there, with their potential for many hours or even days of “weather,” what we encountered was more like the typical summer monsoon weather. Most days started clear or nearly so, and by midday we started to see a build-up of clouds. By sometime in the late afternoon it became apparent that showers were possible, so we went out with appropriate rain gear and protection for camera equipment. As familiar as I am with this weather and even though I’m attentive to the changing conditions, it always seems that the actual onset of rain – typically a few drops seen in the surface of a lake like this one, followed by increasing showers – catches me by surprise. On the afternoon when I made this photograph, as on several other afternoons, there were patches of open sky around and I wasn’t actually expecting rain at the moment it arrived. I made this photograph at one of those moments when the rain was barely enough to feel, but when the pattern of drops on the reflecting surface of the water provided undeniable evidence of precipitation.
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 and Amazon.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
