Tag Archives: atmosphere

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

Winter Fog, Waterfall, and Trees

March 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Fog rises from Yosemite Valley to obscure the view of forest and waterfall

There is so much to write about this photograph – about the place itself, about what happened on this morning and at this moment, about the feeling of this subject, about the idea of making a photograph with so little detail, and even about some technical stuff. However, I’ll try to keep this relatively short… for now.

I made this photograph on the morning after the opening of the Yosemite Renaissance XXIX exhibit in The Valley. Because of this event, there were quite a few photographers in the Valley, including a number of friends, and it seemed like most everyone planned to be out early on this morning to make photographs. My morning plans are often a bit vague – sometimes as vague as “I’ll get up early and see if there is any winter fog around” – and that was the case this day. It was overcast, but I thought that it was possible that either some light might appear from the east or that there might be mist and fog cloaking the upper ridges around the Valley. In any case, we eventually ended up a the famous (or infamous, depending upon your point of view! ;-) Tunnel View, where others we knew were already set up. A favorite winter subject in the Valley is the fog, whether it is seen close up as it floats in front of you in one of the meadows or seen from above from a high point such as Tunnel View. I put a long lens on my camera and began to focus mostly on the fog among the trees on the Valley floor.

This fog almost seems like a living thing, constantly in motion and evolving in unexpected ways. One moment there may be little of it, but within moments it thickens and drifts into view. Or it may drift unexpectedly into the Valley from behind you. It rises up the cliff faces, momentarily obscures and then reveals features, and sloshes back and forth across the Valley. For the most part on this morning it seemed to be drifting among the forest trees, occasionally filling nearly the whole floor of the Valley. As we photographed, the fog moved in our direction along the Valley floor, and then suddenly but silently rose to cover our position, its cold and damp body momentarily limiting our view to a few feet in front of us. I turned my attention, and my camera, downwards toward the trees immediately below the overlook since they were still somewhat visible, and as the fog began to thin once again Bridal Veil falls became momentarily visible once again above the soft edge of the fog.

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

Headlands, Pacific Ocean, Dusk

March 5, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dusk light silhouettes the rugged Marin headlands above the Pacific Ocean disappearing into distant haze.

On a day that began with a visit to the De Young Museum (the final weekend of the David Hockney exhibit) we ended up with some hours of free time in San Francisco… so we decided to head across the Golden Gate and try to be in position somewhere for interesting evening light. We didn’t really have a concrete plan, and we could have ended up in the headlands, along the bay, or perhaps further north along the coast. We stopped for coffee and killed a bit of time in the mid-afternoon light, and by the time we finished the early winter sunset was closer than we had expected.

Looking at the late hour (hey, it was a “vacation day!”) we realized that we didn’t have nearly as much time as we imagined, so we quickly figured out that our best bet was just to head back into the Marin Headlands on the very popular Conzelman Road – yes, the place where hundreds or thousands of people go almost every evening to watch the sun set or the fog roll in (or, sometimes, just a plain old wall of fog!) over the Golden Gate. We drove up the road and the crowds were, as expected, large enough that there were few places to park. In fact, I had to pass up a few possible photographic subjects since I could not stop. Eventually we found a place to pull over and get out and take a look. It was a pretty evening, but the view of the City was not unusually spectacular and I left my camera equipment in the car and just enjoyed the evening view and crisp air. As I stood there, I saw that the backlight over the Pacific outside the golden gate was starting to produce a beautiful diffused light over the water as the atmosphere became increasingly opaque toward the horizon. So I grabbed the tripod and camera and walked up the road a ways to make a few photographs of the ocean and the steep, rugged Marin Headlands cliffs plunging toward the edge of the water.

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

Ocean, Winter Light

March 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Intense winter sunlight reflects on the cloud-shadowed surface of the Pacific Ocean along the Big Sur coast, California

From my perspective, winter is by far the most interesting time to visit and, especially, to photograph along California’s Pacific Ocean coastline. While summer is the popular season for travel, during that time of year the ocean tends to be tranquil and the weather is often foggy. While it is likely to be warm and sunny elsewhere in California in the summer, along the coast it can feel more like winter! But winter along the coast brings much more diverse conditions and even some surprising warmth when conditions are just right. When large Pacific storms churn away far north in the Gulf of Alaska, lines of huge waves may crash on the shoreline. When the storms arrive, the coastal areas can be whipped by wind-driven rain. But between the storms there can be days of crystal clear weather.

That was the weather on the last day of January when we took a long round trip down the Big Sur coast and back. Aside from some (beautiful!) coastal haze that glowed in the midday light, it was a clear day and surprisingly warm for the most part. Along the Big Sur coastline the Pacific Coast Highway alternates between the coastal lowlands and a track that takes it high into the rugged mountains along the shoreline. Vast expanses of the surface of the Pacific are visible from the highest spots, and as we started down from one of these high points we saw the water, with the color and texture of molten metal, stretching away into the sun and towards the horizon, with a few shadows from thin clouds darkening the water near the shore.

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

Coastline, Dusk

February 19, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dusk light falls across the rugged Big Sur coastline, California

This was a very special bit of end-of-day light. Earlier we had spent about nine hours driving south between Monterey and Piedras Blancas on the Big Sur coast, stopping frequently along the way to make photographs of the beautiful winter light. At the southern end of our drive we spent time photographing the elephant seals at their “nursery” alongside the road – a popular place for observing this amazing creatures, especially at this time of year when the females are giving birth and the beach is crowded with all sorts of elephant seals: bulls, females, new babies.

Finishing here, it was time to turn the car north again and head back the way we had come. We started up the Pacific Coast Highway and very soon began the first climb into the coastal hills. We kept an eye out for potential gold hour photographic subjects. There are, of course, no shortage of them along this spectacular coastline, so we figured that we would find something no matter where we were during the last hour of light even though we had no specific plan yet. Eventually we came to a place where we had stopped earlier on the southward drive and we pulled off. Earlier, closer to the middle of the day, the light had been very bright here, illuminating coastal haze and reflecting off the ocean surface in a way that reminds me of molten metal. But now the light was lower and coming in at a more direct angle, and the atmosphere softened and the colors warmed in the late-day light. At first the light was more intense and I made a few photographs with the scene brilliantly colored. At one point I looked away to photograph something else, and when I looked back the sun had dropped behind a semi-transparent band of clouds near the horizon, significantly muting the brightness and color of the light on the base of the hills, but still leaving a few intense spots higher up.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: atmosphere

Winter Fog, Waterfall, and Trees

Headlands, Pacific Ocean, Dusk

Ocean, Winter Light

Coastline, Dusk

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