Tag Archives: broken

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

Canyon Wall

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Canyon Wall
Broken boulders and strata at the base of a slot canyon wall.

Canyon Wall. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Broken boulders and strata at the base of a slot canyon wall.

These canyons are simply full of fascinating details. Unlike much of my familiar Sierra Nevada landscape, where vistas can often go on for many miles, here the size of your world is much smaller. It is constricted to the width of the canyon, the distance to the upper rims (plus some sky), and upstream and downstream to only the next bends. So you are almost forced to focus on smaller details, of which there are many.

Here my attention was drawn to the rocks. I’m no geologist, and I only know enough to speculate about these things. But a close look at the rocks in this scene show material that was created in layers. Near the upper right corner, if you look closely, you can spot a place where there is a striking convergence of angles in the strata. And although this material was laid down in horizontal layers, over time it has been pushed and stretched and lifted until the formerly horizontal now angles up distinctly to the left. There is also an interesting almost vertical fracture between the more solid (and darker) rock on the right, and the lighter color of the broken rocks stacked up on the left.

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

Autumn Aspens, Broken Boulders

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Autumn Aspens, Broken Boulders
A group of autumn aspen trees grows in jumbled and rocky Eastern Sierra Nevada terrain.

Autumn Aspens, Broken Boulders. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A group of autumn aspen trees grows in jumbled and rocky Eastern Sierra Nevada terrain.

Aspen trees frequently grow on what we might regard as less-than-optimal soil and terrain, at least in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. While some manage to find a home in canyon bottoms and other places with good soil, many trees live their lives in dry, rocky, and exposed places. Often the trees seem to adapt — perhaps remaining quite small or maybe maintaining more space between them. The trees in this photograph are growing on truly rocky terrain. The trees are rooted in little more than cracks in the granite, and around them are solid rock and a field of broken granite.

Dealing with color when photographing aspens in locations like this can be tricky, especially since I much prefer to photograph them when they are shaded. (Direct sunlight on these trees can be quite harsh.) The light in shadows can be extremely blue, mainly because the main light source is that giant blue light panel we call the say. On the scene, our human visual system adapts and we register the rocks as gray. But the camera is, to an extent, more objective, and the intense blue color of those “gray” rocks is revealed in a photograph. With that we are faced with a subjective, interpretative question: where should be set the colors along the continuum stretching from the objective blue to what we recall in our mind’s eye? Here, as I often do, I shifted the color away from blue to produce colors that are more like what I recall — and even here those rocks seem quite blue to my eyes. Fortunately, there is no one right answer to this question, and I’ve seen effective interpretations that were strikingly blue along with others that used much warmer colors.

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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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

The Office, Deconstructed

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The Office, Deconstructed
Abandoned and broken chairs abandoned on a Manhattan sidewalk

The Office, Deconstructed. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Abandoned and broken chairs abandoned on a Manhattan sidewalk

I’m no longer quite as surprised as I once was to see what finds its way to the sidewalks, curbs, and gutters in New York City. (I recently arrived at an understanding that people in such places focus more on the quality of their home environments and less on the public environment — beautiful, comfortably designed and equipped homes are found inside buildings that, from a certain perspective, look like dumps from the outside.) If you think about how many people live and work there, it boggles the mind to consider how much stuff flows in and out of the place, including an awful lot of stuff that simply needs to be discarded.

When I walked past this spot, located in an area of very narrow and twisting streets (which should narrow it down for New Yorkers), this particular pile caught my attention. Broken office chairs were piled on the sidewalk, completely blocking it. Nearby were a few other things we might associate with work/office: abandoned coffee cups, an empty cigarette carton. Heck, in a way you might even say there is a “corner” window. Of course, I noted other things, too: the angular and geometric forms of roll-up door, tiled wall, and the strange triangle near the top, plus the soft and blue light in this narrow spot where sun rarely shines, especially in the winter.

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, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Juniper, Sage, and Red Rock

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Juniper, Sage, and Red Rock
A juniper tree stands amidst broken red rock terrain in light reflected from nearby sandstone cliffs

Juniper, Sage, and Red Rock. Capitol Reef National Park, Utah. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A juniper tree stands amidst broken red rock terrain in light reflected from nearby sandstone cliffs

This photograph includes a number of the characteristic features of this southern Utah Landscape: a solitary juniper tree growing from rocky terrain, sage brush and other brushy plants, the textured red rock, and the intensified color from light bouncing from other red rock cliffs nearby. Here, too, is a bit of rock left from a layer of lighter rock — in this area of Capitol Reef National Park steeply tilted strata place such diverse rocks together in surprising places.

This spot is high on a ridge in a less accessible part of Capitol Reef National Park. This park seems like a bit of an oddity in some ways. If you drive through it probably seems tiny, since the road cuts across it narrow east-west dimension, but the park stretches a good distance north and south. The accessible attractions are very appealing, but most of them lie a short distance from the highway, and to get to the more remote areas of the park you are likely going to have to drive a good distance on some less “civilized” roads and then get out and walk. The area where I made the photograph is such a place. While getting their doesn’t require a major expedition, it is far enough away from the main road that the number of visitors is small and silence and solitude are plentiful.

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.