Tag Archives: branch

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

Dogwood Flowers, Merced River

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Dogwood Flowers, Merced River
Dogwood Flowers, Merced River

Dogwood Flowers, Merced River. Yosemite National Park, California. May 4, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Flower-laden spring dogwood branches above the rushing water of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park.

It seems that everyone needs a photograph of white dogwood flowers and green leaves against the backdrop of the waters of the Merced River – and here is mine! I made this photograph on a one-day quick trip to the Valley timed to coincide with the peak of the dogwood blooms. This was a spectacular dogwood blossom season! I had heard reports of larger than usual numbers of the flowers, but I was still very surprised to see how thickly the flowers covered many, many trees. I’ve seen quite a few dogwood blooms in Yosemite Valley, and this had to rank among the most impressive.

The challenges of the “dogwood over water” photographs are several. The first it to find a branch hanging over or near the Merced. This isn’t as easy at is might seem. Such branches aren’t exactly everywhere along the banks of the river, and in many places the flowers face away from the bank – not such an appealing image – or might appear against water that is too rough and provides a distracting background. Often dogwood flowers that catch your attention with their start white shapes turn out to be less than pristine close up – they might have brown tips, holds in the petals, or be discolored – and it can take a bit of looking to find some that are in great shape. Ideally there will be something high above the opposite bank the provides a bit of color to the water. Then there are the conflicting desires to use a long exposure to blur the water a bit while trying to capture a sharply delineated image of the flowers… which sit at the end of long, flexible branches that move in the slightest breeze! With patience, the breezes may eventually pause, and careful timing helps time the exposure between periods of motion.

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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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.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Redwood Forest Light

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Redwood Forest Light
Redwood Forest Light

Redwood Forest Light. Muir Woods National Monument, California. March 24, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Misty morning light shines through coast redwood forest, Northern California

On this late-March morning I headed north over the Golden Gate Bridge, hoping to photograph the trillium bloom at Muir Woods National Monument. Every year this event seems to sneak up on me, and I often just barely catch it before the bloom ends or even miss it. I had heard that the flowers were already in bloom a week earlier, so I wasn’t sure what I would find – but I did get the chance to photograph these flowers that seem to announce the arrival of spring in the redwood forest.

There is a particular trail at this National Monument where I usually go to find the trillium flowers. They seem to like the slightly more open light of this hillside trail, and as I ascend it I usually find quite a few of the flowers… if I arrive at the right time. Every so often I remind myself to look in the other direction, too, since there the hillside drops off steeply, running all the way down to the creek at the bottom of the canyon. The elevated perspective provides a somewhat unusual view into the forest. One challenge of shooting redwoods is that so often you are angling the camera/lens up, and consequently have to deal with various challenges including bright sky appearing in the scene and the effects of converging perspective line. But from this trail it is possible to point the camera horizontally and shoot right into the forest itself, far above the base of the trees down in the canyon below.

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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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.

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

Dried Branch, Sand

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Dried Branch, Sand
Dried Branch, Sand

Dried Branch, Sand. Death Valley National Park, California. April 5, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The dry remnants of a dead plant in recently wind-blown sand dune, Death Valley National Park

I have been visiting Death Valley regularly for perhaps fifteen years, typically photographing there for nearly a week every year for the past decade, and occasionally more. On my most recent trip, from which I returned only days ago, I was thinking about a number of thing regarding my experience with the place and how it has changed. On my first visits there was, of course, the excitement and wonder of discovering a place that was essentially completely new to me. I recall that on my first trip there I got close to the Race Track without going all the way to this location. We camped not far from that playa and I imagined this place that I had heard so much about and even envisioned it in a particular location – and when I did visit a year or two later I discovered that it was quite a bit different from what I imagined, though magical in different and perhaps more powerful ways. After a few years of visiting and photographing the best known iconic sites I began to find them less interesting, and though I continued to photograph them when the opportunity arose, I focused more on expanding the areas I knew about and on looking more closely at areas I thought I knew.

As I did this, I have to confess that portions of the Death Valley experience baffled me or even put me off a bit. While I found some of the terrain to be tremendously beautiful, there were other aspects that I just couldn’t quite relate to. As a person who has spent a lot of time in forested places with flowing water – mainly the Sierra Nevada – I found some areas of this desert to be, quite honestly, boring. I drove through or past them on my way to what I thought of as the more interesting places where I could find colors outside of the range from tan to gray and where some special object or formation might create an obvious center of interest. However, from time to time I would be surprised to find in some plain, nondescript, and even boring place an experience of stillness, immense space, and deep silence that I had rarely encountered elsewhere. More and more, I began to see this as a primary attraction of this landscape – more so in many cases that the specific features of this pinnacle or that formation or the other valley.

On this recent trip, conditions conspired to make me look more closely at some of these things that I had originally overlooked. The conditions were such that if I had experienced them a few years ago I might have simply left. (In fact, that thought did cross my mind once or twice on this trip.) The spectacular light really never came, skies were cloudy, the air was hazy, it was very hot, the winds blew strongly, and there was a dust storm. During the first couple of day, with the exception of shooting the dust storm, many of the subjects I had in mind simply didn’t work out the way I planned. A bit surprisingly, without the possibility of shooting yet another beautiful golden hour sunset image of a spectacular bit of geography (though I did do some of that still) I slowed down and looked more closely at some of those “boring” places that I had passed through more quickly in the past.

This photograph was made in one of those locations. It was not far from one of those iconic locations, but it wasn’t the iconic spot at all. An hour or so before sunset I simply wandered away from the road, past vegetation and into the sand, and started looking around. In the low spots between dunes, the world beyond was out of sight and the wind was blocked, and as the light faded I encountered again that deep and powerful and timeless silence that is so hard to find almost anywhere else.

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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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.

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

Slot Canyon Walls

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Slot Canyon Walls - The sculpted walls of a narrow and curving slot canyon, Zion National Park
The sculpted walls of a narrow and curving slot canyon, Zion National Park

Slot Canyon Walls. Zion National Park, Utah. October 22, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The sculpted walls of a narrow and curving slot canyon, Zion National Park

On the first non-travel day of my most recent Utah visit, since we were passing through Zion National Park on our way to points beyond, we decided to spend the better part of the day shooting there. For a few reasons, including that it was a bit early for fall color there, we chose to not go to Zion Canyon, but to instead spend the time along the Mount Carmel Highway that cuts through the park from west to east. Our object was to photograph the wide range of interesting subjects found there: sandstone of all shapes, textures, and colors; trees, both evergreen and those with fall foliage, and more.

We ended up spending most of the day along this route. An observer might have wondered a bit about us. We would drive slowly along the road in one direction, frequently slowing down and pulling over, looking around a bit, then either getting back on the road or piling out and heading off in various directions – either up into rocks or down into a wash or canyon. Eventually we worked our way to one end of the road’s passage through the park… and we turned around and headed back. We did this loop several times. Why? First, things that you might miss while driving one direction become easier to see when you head the other way. Second, and perhaps most important, light is not a static thing. It changes in may ways – intensity, color, angle, direction, what it strikes and what it misses – as the day goes on, so while the <i>landscape</i> might have been, arguably, “the same,” the <i>lightscape</i> was in constant flux. I made this photograph in a short section of slot canyon, contriving to find a point of view from which almost nothing but the twisting and overlapping forms of the rocks would be visible, along with just a bit of foliage.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.