Tag Archives: blue

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Blue Hour Talus, Cliff and Lake

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Blue Hour Talus, Cliff and Lake
A talus field extends across the shore of an alpine lake

Blue Hour Talus, Cliff and Lake. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A talus field extends across the shore of an alpine lake

During my recent September backcountry expedition to photograph areas of the John Muir Wilderness, we were fortunate to find ourselves in a place with lots of rocky terrain — tall peaks above, mountain slopes all around, talus fields leading into alpine lakes. The lower Sierra country with it forests and gentle steams is wonderful, but I really love the higher and more rugged country, where stunted trees grow among tarns and small lakes, and where the landscape is more and more rocky as you ascend.

Near the lake at which we camped a gigantic talus field descended from the nearby ridge. At first glance such things can appear almost random and undifferentiated, being the rock equivalent of beach sand. But in the right light, looked at in the right way, and especially with a smooth lake surface to reflect their forms, structural patterns and flows begin to appear from the complexity of this landscape. In direct sunlight these rocks can be almost too harsh to photograph, with huge contacts between black shadows and brilliant reflective highlights. But during the morning and evening “blue hour” periods the light is softened, filling in shadows, and adding a different sort of coloration to the scene.

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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: France, Photographs: Urban/Street

Parked Scooter

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Parked Scooter
“Parked Scooter” — A scooter parked along a Paris street

I saw this scooter parked along a street in Paris — in the Le Marais area, if I recall correctly. In many urban European areas, at least that I’ve seen, such things are ubiquitous, along with the many urban bicycles. Here there is really little or no room for a car, but it is possible to squeeze in a bike or a scooter. The retro styling of these things is a lot of fun — they have an appearance that seems like it might have felt hyper-modern… about 40-50 years ago.

The scooter also reminds me of something that I rediscover to varying degrees when I travel, namely how much of what we do and expect is conditioned by familiarity with places and their customs. At one point on this trip we rented a car to drive from Paris (CDG airport) to a location southwest of the city where we would stay for a week. The area was semi-rural, but with towns and villages here and there. Driving in such places would be second-nature to me in the USA, but in France it was anything but! I had to actually try to understand and interpret traffic signs and graphics, something that takes considerably longer when the signs are unfamiliar and one is not a speaker of the local language. Even something as simple as knowing, for example, that it is apparently OK to park a scooter in a place like this would be an utter mystery.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email


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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Talus Field, Shoreline, Reflections

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Talus Field, Shoreline, Reflections
The rocks at the bottom of a large talus field are reflected in still waters.

Talus Field, Shoreline, Reflections. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The rocks at the bottom of a large talus field are reflected in still waters.

The general area where we staying the Sierra backcountry last week featured lots of broken and fallen rock — partly from glacial sources and partly from later erosion — along with tall ridges that gave us hours of soft, shaded light in the morning and the evening. Broken talus slopes are common in the higher reaches of the Sierra, but this area seemed to have an exception amount of the stuff. These talus fields often contain mixtures of rock types, as they are frequently carried down from high peaks.

The talus slope photographed here was just across the lake from where we were camped, so I was able to walk over a few hours before the first sunlight finally made it over the peak to our east. The jumbled and jagged rocks and boulders covered the slope right down to (and beyond) the edge of the lake. In the shadow of the nearby mountain the light was soft and quite blue, the latter because almost all of the illumination was coming from that giant light panel we call the sky. I photographed for quite a while, until a breeze came up and broke the quiet surface of the water.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Blue Goose Among The White

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Blue Goose Among The White
A solitary “blue goose” in a flock of white (mostly) Ross’s geese

Blue Goose Among The White. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A solitary “blue goose” in a flock of white (mostly) Ross’s geese

A “blue goose” was something I had heard of but didn’t understand — like the “blue moon.” (Yes, I do now know what that is, too!) A few years ago I ran into a wildlife refuge employee while photographing and we got to talking. He remembered that he had seen an unusual bird earlier that day, and he offered to take me to see the “blue goose.”

That sounded crazy. I had never seen or heard of a goose that was blue in color. (That said, in the right light, the whitest geese can appear to be blue in photographs. I’ll explain some other time…) We came to a large flock of the usual white geese and he pointed into the mob of birds and said, “There it is!” At first I couldn’t spot it but eventually I saw that one of the geese was considerably darker than the rest of the flock. I photographed the goose in this photograph on a different occasion — you should be able to spot the anomalously darker blue goose in the middle of the scene. For the record, the “blue goose” is not a separate type of goose — it is one of the common types, but in an unusual color “morph.”

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Email

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