“Marsh and Fog, Sunrise” — Fog envelopes a wetlands marsh at sunrise.
This was a morning of utmost stillness and quiet. We worked our way around the perimeter of a wetlands landscape filled with ponds. Geese and sandhill cranes were beginning to stir in the first light. There was thick tule fog before dawn, and it started to thin as the sky began to lighten as the sun rose.
These wetlands marshes can be a welcome antidote to the stresses of our current world. (No, I don’t believe in ignoring the causes of that stress, just in trying to find balance.) Here things move so slowly that sometimes they barely appear to change at all. In this scene a few ducks paddled by slowly, and tiny ripples appeared in the water, while fog moved almost imperceptibly.
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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.
“Old Tree, Central Park” — A gigantic old tree with spreading branches in Central Park, Manhattan.
We were in New York City during the holidays this past December. We had just the right amount of snowfall, an inch or so to create a mood but not enough to bring things to a standstill. We stayed not far from Central Park — perhaps a ten minute walk from the west past the natural history museum — and we visited on several mornings. I’ve come to understand how Manhattanites value the place as their portal to nature.
Much of the snow had melted by the time of this visit, but if you look closely you may notice a bit left on the grassy area under the tree. The park is full of remarkable groves and individual trees, but this specimen especially caught my attention. It is a very big tree and its branches spread widely over this area of meadow.
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.
Autumn plants and lichen lend color to basalt columns, Devils Postpile National Monument
Quite honestly, this photograph was at least partially the product of laziness! We were recently in the eastern Sierra Nevada for a few (more) days of autumn color photography. We had driven up late the previous day, and by the time we got settled in to our lodgings the idea of getting up again at “oh-dark-thirty” to head out and make dawn photographs was not appealing. Rather than overtly cop out, we sort of agreed to maybe not set alarms and instead just sort of see when we might wake up. Needless to say, on the morning after a very long drive that ended late at night… we did not get up at the crack of dawn! In fact, we wandered out for breakfast at perhaps 7:30 or so, and only then returned to our room to get ready for photography.
With no prior planning at all, we made a more or less spontaneous decision to visit Devils Postpile National Monument, which was convenient to our lodgings at Mammoth Lakes. I’ve been in that area many times, but always in conjunction with backpacking trips, and most of those simply headed out from Agnew Meadow. We finally got down there in the middle of the morning. It turns out that this is actually a very good time to photograph this geological structure, as the sun is behind it, producing beautiful soft shaded light on the details of the basalt columns. To make a series of photographs from which this image comes, I used a very long lens, which allowed me to isolate and compose photographs out of small areas of the much larger wall of basalt columns. (Update — December 2015: Patty Emerson Mitchell reminds me that I almost left my camera in the car on this morning, claiming that I was really just there to let her see this location!)
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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