Tag Archives: bright

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

Dissipating Storm Clouds, Sunset

November 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Sunset light on dissipating thunderstom clouds above granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

Late on this September afternoon in the Yosemite back-country I had a good idea that something might happen around sunset, but I could not have known in advance just how intense the cloud color would turn out to be. The set-up was classic. Thunder storms had built up throughout the afternoon, and by late in the day I would see and hear large storms to my north and east – though I remained right on the edge of the storm potential as I was a bit further west. As evening approached the cloud-building forces began to diminish, leaving the tops of the larger cells unsupported, and they began to thin and stretch westward, curving up and over my location along the Tuolumne River.

Knowing that interesting light of one sort or another was probable, I walked to an area of granite slabs and bowls that I had photographed when visiting this area at the start of my trip nearly a week earlier. As I considered a few photographs of the granite and trees in that area, my attention kept being drawn to the sky. At first it remained a relatively low contrast mass of gray, though the thinning clouds started to allow views through falling virga towards more distant clouds that rose into the sunlight. Then, as the sun dropped and the foreground lost the direct light, the clouds began to light up and take on wildly saturated colors. (A technical note: in many of the photographs, though not in this one, the dynamic range between cloud highlights and foreground was so large that it required multiple exposures separated by up to five stops to capture it all!)

I moved to the base of the granite bowl in which I had photographed rocks and small trees a week before when I saw these spectacular clouds building to the north west. The color was simply unbelievable – and you can see that the intense saturated light was not just in the sky, but that it also colored the granite near the bottom of the image. For this photograph I used a short focal length to try to take in a large section of the flowing and wildly shaped and colored clouds.

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

Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon

November 7, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A dry wash descends past the barren hills of Twenty Mule Team Canyon in morning shadows, Death Valley National Park.

I made this photograph on an early morning in early April a couple of years ago. I had gone to Death Valley National Park’s Twenty Mule Team Canyon to photograph some folded and eroded patterns in the upper portion of this valley, and a bit after sunrise I noticed a trail heading up a side canyon. I decided to follow it. It started out by ascending the wash shown in the photograph and eventually reached a low saddle along the eroded ridge of between this canyon and the descent to Death Valley itself. When I arrived there, as sometimes happens in Death Valley, I discovered an old vehicle track heading down into the canyon on the other side.

Since I had some other plans for a bit later in the morning, and because I didn’t see anything immediately exciting on the other side of this ridge as the route descended, I instead backtracked into this wash. As my trail crossed the broad area across from this line of hills I looked back toward the main valley and saw this sunlit s-curve in front of the somewhat shaded ridge.

Related: See my extensive posts on Photographing Death Valley

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Color, South Fork Bishop Creek

October 29, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Brilliant peak autumn color in aspen groves along the south fork of Bishop Creek, eastern Sierra Nevada.

One week earlier I had visited this same area only to find a mixture of trees that had lost their leaves during a series of early fall snow storms and trees that were essentially still fully green. What a difference a week made! This fall it seemed that once the color change started, it moved quickly. Not only were these middle elevation trees in full autumn color, but in many places the color extended all the way down to the edge of Owens Valley.

These trees are along the south fork of Bishop Creek, off of the road to South Lake, and not far from so-called “Mist” or “Misty” falls. (I’m skeptical about this waterfall – it gives every appearance of having been constructed by redirecting water to a place where it would not likely flow naturally. I’ll welcome accurate information about that.) Perhaps because these trees grow in a fairly open and wide valley, many of them have managed to grow rather tall and quite straight, in contrast to a number of other Sierra groves that consist of small and often twisted trees. The rows of trees angle up slopes from the creek in the valley bottom and seem to be arranged in diagonal groves that ascend the hillside.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Thicket, Bishop Creek

October 21, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Bright yellow autumn leaves festoon a dense aspen thicket along Bishop Creek near South Lake, California.

At the right point during the aspen season there are so many potential photographic “targets” that it can be almost overwhelming. In this general area along the south fork or Bishop Creek, there were many stands of aspens that were at or just past their color peak. I knew of this row of trees that follows the course of the stream and which is accessible by way of a short gravel road that takes off from the main road – I had photographed them in slightly less interesting conditions last year. This particular little loop road has a number of potential aspen subjects, but this year when I arrived it seemed like the most interesting trees were in this spot near where the side road starts.

I’m intrigued by densely packed trees, so dense that the white trunks, yellow leaves, and the various sized branches can grow together and almost completely fill the space within the grove. This little thicket seemed about as close to exactly what I was looking for as anything else I saw along those lines this year. By shooting at an angle across the line of trees, the light hit their trunks from the left side of the frame, and the depth of the grove was accentuated just a bit. With so much detail to work with it can be a bit hard to find a composition that isn’t overwhelmed by the sheer amount of detail, so here I looked for a section of the grove where the closely spaced white trunks gave some shape and direction to the scene.

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Tag Archives: bright

Dissipating Storm Clouds, Sunset

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Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon

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Aspen Color, South Fork Bishop Creek

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Aspen Thicket, Bishop Creek

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

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