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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Grove, Boulders

October 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A grove of autumn aspen trees among large boulders, Bishop Creek, California.

There is something special and perhaps hard to define about the light inside an aspen grove as the leaves change color in the autumn. It is a visually complex place in many ways – various colorful leaves are overhead, more leaves are dropping constantly to the ground, the ground itself is littered with layers of leaves ranging from brand now and colorful to old and black, other materials such as rocks and grasses and brush may grow between the trees, and the interlocking branches of the closely spaced trees can make progress difficult to nearly impossible. And every grove seems to have its own unique personality. Some will be full of tall and straight trees, and may allow more light in. Others may consist of trees barely taller than a person, and thin-truck trees may be packed closely together. Some have been affected by difficult soil or heavy snow and are full of bent and twisted trees.

This grove is almost within a small campground in the south fork of Bishop Creek. I have shot in this area in the past since a nearby section of the grove often seems to suddenly drop masses of colorful leaves very quickly, so it can be a good place to shoot leaves on the ground. This time, though, I wandered in a different direction and ended up in this area where smallish and seemingly stunted trees grew among large rocks and boulders. The challenge was to try to find a composition in this very busy scene. The first challenge is finding a spot that is open enough to show an expanse of the grove, followed by then moving the camera – sometimes by fractions on an inch – to try to come up with some reasonable alignment of trees and boulders, all the while trying to avoid letting the overly bright sky end up in the frame.

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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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Early Snow, Buried Plants

October 25, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

An early fall Sierra Nevada snow storm buries meadow plants.

As I have written elsewhere, this year’s aspen color season got off to a rather strange start. Just as the first, high-elevation trees were starting to get their early peak color, an unusually cold series of winter-like storms swept over California and the Sierra during the first week of October. The storms dropped more than a foot of snow in some places, at a time of year when a few inches-deep dustings are more the rule. As the last storm came to an end, I crossed the Sierra via Tioga Pass literally hours after it was reopened, and headed south toward the Bishop area in the evening.

Early the next morning I drove up into the Bishop Creek drainage, encountering the first snow below 8000′. Shortly after passing the village of Aspendell I came to the junction with the gravel road to north lake. The road had not been plowed (and I later heard that it had been closed for several days) but I saw that a few other cars had headed up that way, so I pointed my all-wheel-drive vehicle that direction and drove the short, frozen road to the lower end of the lake. I parked here, loaded up my camera gear, and set off on foot.

It was cold! Before I finished a few hours later I was quite cold, which isn’t surprising since the temperature remained below freezing and I was working in snow. The storm had taken out quite a lot of the colorful aspen leaves. I photographed a few trees, but I also concentrated on other subjects such as fallen aspen leaves lying on the fresh snow. As I walked along the lake I realized that the scene really looked more like winter than like autumn, so I switched gears mentally and made some photographs of the snow that seem more like what I might shoot in the middle of winter. This photograph shows a section of the lakeside meadow that had been covered deeply enough with snow that in places only a few plants were still visible.

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

Autumn Foliage, Pond, Conway Summit

October 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Afternoon sunlight strikes fall foliage surrounding a small pond in the eastern Sierra Nevada at Conway Summit.

As is perhaps obvious from the photograph, the sky was not entirely unobscured when I made this series of photographs of the large aspen groves at Conway Summit in the eastern Sierra Nevada in the middle of October. The changing light was an asset in that it had the potential to highlight elements of the scene and de-emphasize others, and that it was constantly changing. But it also meant that at some points the scene was so flat as to be uninteresting. In other words, I had to stand around a lot, waiting for the light to suddenly appear, only to go away a moment later.

I had been watching this small pond, surrounded by aspens and brush and reflecting the sky, for some time. I wanted just the right side light to illuminate the trees and brush, but to also get something to happen on the more distant rolling hills. At one point beautiful light had lit up the foreground grove… but it had left the closest brush in shadow. At other points the more distant hills picked up interesting light… while the grove remained in shadow. Here I had a few moments of slightly cloud-diffused light on the grove (though I could have wished for a bit more on the trees at right) and brush, along with a beam of light picking up one of the more distant groves and the slanting ridge line in front of it.

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

Aspen Groves, Conway Summit

October 23, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late afternoon sun backlights the immense aspen groves near Conway Summit, California.

As the sun dropped toward the peaks of the Sierra crest to the west of Conway Summit, beams of light occasionally broke through the partly cloudy skies and backlit these brilliantly colored aspen groves alongside highway 395. I’ve shot here enough times over the past few years to understand how the light works here – though I admit that every time I think I understand, I discover something new! For me, the ideal is to go to Conway Summit right at the peak of aspen color, or perhaps a bit earlier when a few green trees remain, and to shoot in late-afternoon light, aiming almost directly into the sun. The color of the light coming through these leaves is almost unbelievably intense and saturated – and, in fact, is a bit of a tricky thing to photograph!

There are many attractive things about Conway Summit when it comes to aspen viewing. (There are also, admittedly, a few less attractive things, such as shooting from the edge of a four-lane highway!) The stands of aspens are extensive here, covering many acres. Because of the slightly elevated viewpoint, the observer can look down into and across the trees as they follow the slope gently rising toward the Sierra. There are actually a large number of separate groves that stand mostly in lines stretching from left to right, and each of them is often in a different stage of color development at this point in the season, with the result being that trees of almost every shade from green to brilliant red can be seen at once.

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