Tag Archives: basic

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Black Point and Negit Island

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Black Point and Negit Island
Tufa formations, Black Point, Negit Island, and distant hills in sunset light at Mono Lake.

Black Point and Negit Island. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Tufa formations, Black Point, Negit Island, and distant hills in sunset light at Mono Lake.

Yes, this is yet one more — but probably the last — of the photographs of this lovely autumn evening at Mono Lake a few years ago. Most of the others feature the rising full moon, but I made this one a few minutes before that event, while the last of the day’s sun was still streaming over the Sierra crest and striking the tops of the mountains to the east of Mono Basin.

Besides being a photograph of a beautiful time of day at the lake, the scene includes a number of important little elements that might not be immediately obvious. In the foreground we see a few of the ubiquitous tufa formations that dot the border of the lake, quite a few of which were revealed when Los Angeles’ thirst for Sierra Nevada dropped the lake level. This also reveals sections of the curving lake shore that would have been underwater some decades ago. At the far left is the dark bulk of Black Point, and intriguing formation that few get to actually visit. Just of Black Point’s shoulder is Negit Island, one of two volcanic islands in the lake. to its right you can barely see the low north side of larger Paoho island. And those far mountains where a bit of sun still shines are a very long ways away, and it a location that is pretty close to inaccessible.

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.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Early Fall Color, Rocky Basin

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Early Fall Color, Rocky Basin
Early fall season color comes to a rocky basin on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada

Early Fall Color, Rocky Basin. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. September 19, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early fall season color comes to a rocky basin on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada

This photograph has sat on my computer’s “desktop” for weeks — perhaps even months now — since I completed most of my autumn Eastern Sierra photographs for the year and moved on to other things.

It wasn’t first to be posted because it isn’t either an impressively colorful photograph nor one that is of an unusual subject. In fact, the spot is one that I know well — I photographed from a high place that I visit every year. This time I was there early, more mid-September than my usual early October. I was surprised to find this much color in this area so soon.

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 and Amazon.
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Photographs: Nature

Wildfire Smoke, Early Morning

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Wildfire Smoke, Early Morning
layers of thick wildfire smoke obscure the morning light

Wildfire Smoke, Early Morning. Along US 395, California. September 18, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

layers of thick wildfire smoke obscure the morning light

This was the culmination of more than twelve hours of observation of a developing wildfire located east of the Sierra Nevada, roughly between Lee Vining and Mammoth Lakes. The previous evening I finished a hike into the Sierra backcountry not far from Tioga Pass, returning to my car well after sunset. As I drove back down Lee Vining Canyon in the near-darkness I saw a big tower of smoke to the southeast and the tell-tale glow of fire on the bottom of the cloud. The next morning I woke up and headed straight back toward Mono Lake, from which I figured I could photograph conditions related to the fire.

I began photographing Mono Lake itself, where the lake was still mostly visible with only a few thin smoke clouds floating over it. But very soon this changed as winds brought the smoke right over Mono Lake, casting a pall over the scene all the way up to Conway Summit. My goal was to head south along the eastern escarpment, but as I did so the smoke only became thicker. I made this photograph at a point closer to the fire, where the smoke was very, very thick, enough so to take away most of the sunlight and add a post-apocalyptic quality to the scene.

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

Morning Musings, Technique

Making Aperture Selection Easy (Morning Musing for 8/22/14)

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From time to time I see questions from photographers trying to figure out exactly which aperture is the “right” one for a particular photograph. Some will go so far as to consult depth of field calculators (or “DOF calculators”) to help them decide whether the should open up a third of a stop from f/11.

There may be times where that sort of precision aperture selection is useful, but in many cases you can make things a lot simpler*, basically selecting from one of three general options:

  1. If depth of field isn’t a big issue — let’s say you are shooting a relatively flat subject — simply use a “middle of the road” aperture that will be sharp on your lens/camera combination. The old rule of thumb about using f/8 is a decent one to follow here, although cropped sensor shooters might go for something more like f/5.6.
  2. If you need very deep depth of field, go straight to the smallest aperture you feel comfortable using. On a full frame camera this is likely to be about f/16, while on a cropped sensor camera it might be a bit larger, perhaps in the f/11 or so range. If your need for extra deep depth of field is strong enough that you are willing to give up a small degree of overall image sharpness — which will be invisible in small images anyway —  you might even go one stop smaller on some occasions to f/22 on full frame and f/16 on crop.
  3. If you need to limit depth of field to throw background elements out of focus, simply try the largest aperture that your lens has — but consider stopping down just a bit if you need just a bit more depth of field.

Basically, for most photographs, especially if you have good light and/or are using a tripod, you could probably get away with considering only three apertures in most cases — the “normal” one, the really small one, and the really big one.

  • Yes, this is a bit of a simplification, though it really does work in the vast majority of the photographs that most people are making. Clearly things can get a bit more complicated if you are, for example, shooting in very low light or need to deal with moving subjects. In the interest of keeping this “Easy” description easy, I’ll simply acknowledge those possibilities here without elaborating.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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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