Tag Archives: atmosphere

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

Pacific Ocean, Evening Sky and Fog

June 24, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Thin evening fog clouds drift above the Pacific Ocean along the California coastline.

This is a favorite sort of view of mine along California’s coastline – a calm (almost) summer evening near dusk, but only a few wisps of fog trying to collect themselves along the shoreline, but not quite making it. So much of what I photograph has at least some green in it – so this palette limited to shades of blue and pink seems special.

Although it was not quite so still when I made this photograph – I was along the edge of a bluff not far from the highway – the visual image captures for me the feeling of timelessness that I sometimes experience at the coast. I’ve lived in these areas almost my entire life, so I’m no stranger to the coast and beaches. (Though I continue to see and learn new things. But most such experiences are tied to roads and parking lots and even to urban areas. A few years ago, believe it or not, I had a very different experience with the ocean when I walked perhaps four miles to a point along the sheltered waters of Point Reyes, and coming to the coast on foot I felt, for the first time at the ocean, this sense of deep time and I felt that what I was seeing had probably changed little, if at all, in millennia. I can literally count the number of times that I’ve had the profound realization, and I was alone on each occasion – the Point Reyes experience, on a still evening away from camp above timberline in the Upper Kern River region of the Southern Sierra, and on one memorable day on my first (two-week!) solo backpacking trip when I found myself sitting on top of a 12,000′ Sierra pass for several hours.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Tree, Fog, Dawn Sky

May 29, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A lone tree on pasture land of a foggy late-winter morning with pre-dawn clouds, San Joaquin Valley

Back near the beginning of March in this year that seems to have brought an early end to winter I headed out to the Central Valley to do what was likely my last migratory bird photography of the season. When I left the San Francisco Bay Area well before dawn for the trip out to the valley the skies were clear, and I was just a bit disappointed in that I prefer at least a bit of fog for this subject. The fog gods must have heard me, since as I neared my first location in a low-lying and often wet area of the valley, fog began to collect just before sunrise. It was that wonderful sort of fog that is almost opaque, but which moves around and changes enough that at least some of the time nearby subjects are visible and it is possible to see early morning clouds in the sky above.

Although my plan was to photograph birds, at first I didn’t see the birds I was most interested in (sandhill cranes and Ross’s geese), so I kept moving and eventually ended up in this flat pasture area where a few isolated trees stood along on newly green ground, with groves of trees beyond and the soft shapes of early morning clouds overhead. This soft light is a special feature of this area in the cool, damp season, and it characterizes my experience with this place. Before long the fog began to thin, the sun came out, and I found birds to photograph.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Coastal Valley, Morning Light

May 2, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early morning light streams across ridges and illuminates mist filling a coastal valley along the Big Sur coastline of California

This might be described as “yet another in a series” of photographs made along the Pacific Coast Highway south of Monterey, in which I look for canyons filled with misty early morning light, aim my camera up into the canyon, and see what I can come up with. The elements are: fog that it thin enough to pass light, early morning back-light spilling over the tops of coastal ridges, canyons and valleys with many overlapping ridges, lush and green coastal vegetation. The variations are endless. The challenges are finding canyons with just the right combinations of these elements and, of course, shooting straight into the light, a favorite technique of mine.

This little valley is one that you would most likely pass by and not even see, since it is small and in a section of the coast where you attention is likely to be drawn the other way and toward the Pacific ocean. I’ve seen this spot a few times as I have driven past, but I had assumed that it might not be photograph-able given some power lines and the scarcity of places to pull over and park. This time I looked a bit closer and thought I saw a way to shoot from alongside the highway and perhaps avoid the wires and I did see a small pull-out nearby, so I turned around at the next opportunity, came back, and spent a bit of time working this scene.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Aspens, Boulder Mountain, Evening

May 1, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn aspens in front of rugged landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah

This was an especially beautiful evening on the shoulder of the Boulder Mountain area of Utah. Six months earlier, on our first visit to this state, we had passed over Boulder Mountain early in April, before the spring leaves had appeared on the tremendous aspen groves found here. I imagined that this must be quite a sight in the fall when all of those aspens would inevitably change to yellow and gold and red and orange. With this in mind we planned our fall visit to cross this area again in early October, figuring that this would be about the right time for fall color.

It turns out that we probably missed the absolute peak of color – partly because the change happens on a slightly different schedule in these Utah mountains than in “my” Sierra Nevada, and because the transition seemed to occur a bit early this year, perhaps due to dry conditions earlier in the year. When we arrived we found that at the highest elevations the trees were already devoid of leaves. However, as we passed around the shoulder of the range to turn toward Torrey, we came upon some extensive and beautiful stands of colorful trees just before sunset and stopped to make photographs. This photograph looks across nearby aspens in the shadow of high clouds and beyond to the sandstone terrain in the area between Capitol Reef National Park and the small town of Boulder, an area that we finally got to investigate a few days later after crossing over the high country of Capitol Reef. At the time I made this photograph there was a nice soft haze – my kind of conditions! – and high clouds to the west were creating a lightscape alternating shadows and sun that played across the terrain.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: atmosphere

Pacific Ocean, Evening Sky and Fog

Tree, Fog, Dawn Sky

Coastal Valley, Morning Light

Aspens, Boulder Mountain, Evening

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