Tag Archives: atmosphere

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Meadow, Forest, and Dome

September 11, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon light along the edge of Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park

Late in the afternoon, about the time that many day visitors leave Tuolumne Meadows for their lodgings and when many campers are fixing dinner, I wandered out into the meadow with no particular destination in mind. With the exception of a few other walkers and two or three deer, I mostly had the meadow to myself. I walked slowly along a narrow finger of grasses between trees encroaching that are gradually encroaching on the meadow, passed through the last trees in one of these stands, and found myself in a large section of open meadow. After so many years in the Sierra and particularly in this place, it has a quiet and comfortable and unhurried feeling on an evening like this one.

Farther downstream the larger forest trees came to the edge of the meadow, and late afternoon golden light slanted across the meadow past these trees. Beyond the shoulder of a granite dome sloped down toward the lower terrain, catching the sun from the west.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Fog, Water, Light

August 12, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A beam of light on water below fog, Pacific Ocean

Living very close to the Pacific coast of California for nearly my entire life, the ocean has always “been there” — just on the other side of coastal mountains, hardly more than a half hour away, bringing cooling evening breezes on hot summer days, and producing periodic morning fog where I live. On one hand I am more familiar with this landscape than most people, but in recent years I began to feel that I know much less about it than I should. These photographs made with the camera pointing straight out to see are something of a them of mine, not as frequent as photographs of mountains perhaps, but important nonetheless. They might include fog or winter swell or clearing storm clouds or simply the brilliant light on the water from the western sun. To me they are all a bit mysterious.

We had spent a couple of days along the Big Sur coast photographing (and eating!). The main part of the visit was over, but we had a full day to get home, and home was only about an hour and a half away. So we took our time and followed the coast almost all the way north to San Francisco before turning inland. During much of the drive we were in the sun, but north of Santa Cruz the fog began to appear, and eventually we arrived at that point where the offshore fog bank was substantial enough to form a virtual wall against the light. We stopped and I photographed as the eastern edge of the fog picked up a bit of light and the sun broke through a few clearings to illuminate the surface of the water.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Dust Storm, Desert Mountains

June 7, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dust from a desert sand storm fills the air and obscures mountains

You’ll have to look closely to make sense of this one. Made on April 1st, there is a certain sense about this photograph of a minor April Fools joke played at my expense. I had experienced several days of very dusty conditions in Death Valley. On the first day I was way up in the Panamint Mountains at dawn, only to discover that I was still within a cloud of dusty air the extended up to well above 8000′ of elevation. I never did figure out where it was coming from, as the Valley itself certainly wasn’t producing it. That night the winds came to the Valley and blew a decent sand storm through my camp. The next day I figured that I would try to find a way to evade the blowing dust.

I got up very early — as always — and headed out of Death Valley and to the east toward Nevada. I then took a long back road route back into the park. This route took me on back-country gravel roads through the Amargosa Range, eventually dropping down into a deep canyon before heading back to Death Valley. Driving in these mountains and down this canyon, I forgot about the dusty conditions — here there wasn’t more than a bit of hazy atmosphere and the wind didn’t work its way into this canyon either. At the bottom of the canyon the route finally emerged from a narrow canyon and arrived at the top of a huge gravel fan stretching down toward the Valley. And here I saw the extent of the dust and wind, as the entire Valley was full of dust that was well-distributed yet thick enough to almost completely obscure the mountain range on the other side. My day of clear weather came to an abrupt end as I descended into the dust and wind and headed back to my camp.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Death Valley, Evening

May 19, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light on the playa of Death Valley, with lower slopes of the Panamint Mountains rising beyond

Since I’ve been traveling to and around Death Valley National Park for more than 15 years now, I’ve seen a lot of the park — but I most certainly have not see all of it, nor have I completely learned how to see everything in it. This is a huge place, varying greatly by location, terrain, season, weather and more. Frankly, the experience of coming to know such a place over time is one of the things I value most about such locations. While I love to “discover” a place that is completely new to me (and Death Valley was that place in the late 1990s for me), the longer process of learning the place and its rhythms more deeply is also, I think, more rewarding. It is wonderful to see a desert gully in evening light for the first time, but it may be even more beautiful to come back to it and recognize an old and familiar friend.

Along these lines, a few years ago, as I continued to push out my own boundaries of experience and knowledge in Death Valley, I began to think more about how to make photographs of things that I might have not thought worthy of a photograph before. I realized that many of these things that don’t scream “photograph me!” are otherwise a core part of the experience of this place: a vast and quiet “empty” landscape, midday sun, haze obscuring great distances, the edge between the last vegetation and a barren playa, a beam of light slanting across an alluvial fan. And if they are central to the sense of the place, it seems that there must be a way to photograph them. And that is a new challenge for me in my Death Valley photography.

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.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: atmosphere

Meadow, Forest, and Dome

Fog, Water, Light

Dust Storm, Desert Mountains

Death Valley, Evening

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