Tag Archives: california

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Snag, Lake, Mountains, Evening

August 18, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Golden hour light on the lower slopes of a high Sierra peak is reflected by the surface of a lake

Arriving at this lake would normally require a one-day walk from the usual trailhead. Our group planned to make a little detour to circumnavigate a nearby peak, however, and take two days to get there. It did take me two days, but not for the reasons I expected! The day before we got a later start than I would have liked, and we ended up doing most of the hiking in the afternoon. That probably would have been fine, except that a fairly serious bit of weather arrived when I was only about two-thirds of the way to my goal. At that point I decided to set up my tent and settle in — which turned out to be a good idea, as it rained for the next three hours!

So, the next morning I found myself several miles and a good climb short of the previous day’s goal. I recalculated, got up slowly, spent some time drying my gear, and was on the rail shortly before noon. The revised plan was now to head straight to this lake, bypassing the original longer route… and hoping to avoid more rain! In the afternoon it did appear that more rain was moving in, but something changed and the clouds moved away, leaving completely clear skies in the evening when I made this photograph.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Morning Above The Meadow

August 17, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First light comes to ridges and peaks above a subalpine meadow

Nothing was yet open along Tioga Pass Road when I visited in late July. Typically all of the campgrounds would be open by this point, but an exceptionally heavy winter snowfall had delayed the process of clearing the road and opening up the high country. There was still a lot of snow at around 10,000′ and higher, and water was running high and fast everywhere. Early in the morning I drove back into the park from my camp site just east of the crest, heading down to Tuolumne Meadows to make some early morning photographs.

I’m often a bit surprised by how few people who camp at Tuolumne manage to make it out to the meadow for first light, missing what is arguably the most beautiful time of the day. On this day, with the campground closed, there was almost no one else at the meadow — I had the place almost entirely to myself. I stopped at the lower end of the meadow and looked back to the east, across the meadow and then a series of successive ridges, including a couple of well-known domes, and finally to the summit of Mount Dana. The sun had just risen on the east side of the range, and its light was beginning to pour over the ridges of the Sierra crest.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Morning Reflection

August 16, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The image of a shoreline forest is reflected in the still morning waters of a subalpine lake

Since the Tuolumne Meadows campground (along with everything else along Tioga Pass Road) was still not open during this late-July visit (in the aftermath of a very heavy snow year) I ended up camping at a forest service campground just outside the park. Since this place wasn’t ideally located for photography I ended up doing a fair amount of driving — down 120 towards Mono Lake and nearby areas, or back up 120 into the park. On this morning my pre-dawn drive took me over the pass, into the park, and down through the virtually deserted Tuolumne Meadows area.

I continued on along this road, eventually arriving this popular lake to find it deserted at this early hour. Later in the morning the hordes would arrive here, but in the very early morning I had it to myself. The water was almost still as I set up my camera, with the tiniest bit of mist floating above its surface. I made a couple of exposures, and suddenly the reflections were broken up as breezes began to stir the surface of the lake.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Lake and Mountain, Morning

August 15, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dawn light comes to mountain slopes above a reflecting High Sierra backcountry lake

I woke up early on the third and final morning of this pack trip — not early by photographic standards, but just before dawn, nonetheless. The rest of my party — perhaps because they are not photographers — continued to sleep in for another hour or more as I crawled out of my tent, gathered up my (downsized for this trip) camera equipment, and wandered off to see what I could see.

The sun had still not quite risen as I came to the top of a small hill above the lake, but very soon its light began to touch the highest peaks and stream across the shoulder of the large peak towering above the opposite shoreline of the lake. Sometimes the scale of a subject such as this mountain seems more obvious to me when I choose to not include all of it, so I chose to crop tightly enough to not show the peak — or the relatively uninteresting plain blue sky above it. (My theory is that a photograph framed so that the entire subject isn’t visible can sometimes produce an impression that the subject is so large that it cannot be contained within the frame.) As I made this exposure the first light was hitting the rocky face of the upper slopes of the mountain, and that light was reflected in the undisturbed early morning surface of the lake.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: california

Snag, Lake, Mountains, Evening

Morning Above The Meadow

Morning Reflection

Lake and Mountain, Morning

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