Tag Archives: california

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

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

October 28, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn foliage on a steep, rocky eastern Sierra Nevada slope

This is a bit of a complicated photograph, and I’ll try to make some sense out of it below. The back story is that I was in the eastern Sierra doing some fall color photography, and early on this Saturday morning I had gone to a fairly popular location for photography. It is a place that I’ve photographed many times, going all the way back to a few years ago just before the huge popularity of digital cameras began to bring sometimes-overwhelming numbers of photographers to the area. I was quite sure that there would be large groups there on this morning, including photography workshop participants lined up along the shoreline of the nearby lake, but I also knew that there would be plenty of other things for me to photograph without joining the crowd.

I began by making some photographs of small things — little vignettes of a few aspen leaves, some rocks and boulders, light shining through branches holding colorful leaves. As I did this I saw that the far side of the canyon was going to remain in shadow after the sun began to wash things out elsewhere, so I decided to use a long lens and photograph trees and rocks in that location from a distance. Most of the photographs feature more obvious subjects such as an individual grove of colorful trees, but in this one I decided to just go with the complexity of the scene, which includes broken rocks, brush, and a few small aspen trees.

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

Evening Light, Haze, Granite

October 27, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Soft evening light among granite slabs and cliffs in the Yosemite backcountry

Near our Yosemite backcountry camp there was a beautiful granite bowl, with a bench on top with an open view to the west down the canyon of the nearby river. In the late afternoon and evening we were photographing lots of mostly small details in this area — trees growing out of improbably small cracks and potholes, rocks, and the colors and textures of the granite slabs.

As the sun dropped toward the horizon, its light spread almost directly up the length of the canyon. A large wildfire in another part of the park had left the air smoky and the smoke added a warm coloration to the atmosphere. As these conditions came on I remembered that in the past I had found this tree high up on one of the canyon walls in the evening and had photographed it in similar late day light — so I turned the camera in that direction, and just in time! I made a vertical format photograph as the last bright light broke over the shoulder of the granite and lit the tree. I decided to turn the camera to landscape orientation, and by the time I did the light was already starting to leave the tree — and this photograph ended up with softer light and a darker quality than the first one.

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

Old Tree and Autumn Color, Sierra Nevada

October 24, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An old tree stands above an eastern Sierra Nevada valley full of autumn aspen color

I got a somewhat late start on first day of this year’s trip to the Sierra to photograph the annual aspen color transition. The plan was to begin in the Tahoe area, since I needed some photographs of that region, and to then work my way down the east side of the range as far as Bishop. This was to be a somewhat complicated trip, since I’m concurrently working on a number of projects, not all of which are related to this photography! For this reason and others, I wasn’t able to leave early in the morning like I usually do, but I figure that this would still get me to some of the good aspen areas by the late afternoon hours of good light.

I went into the Sierra on highway 88 and climbed toward the Sierra crest at Carson Pass. Although the west side of the crest isn’t typically the best place to look for aspens, this pass is a bit of an exception, and I saw my first colorful autumn aspens well before the pass. There were more and more of them as I got closer to the pass, and I stopped to photograph some of them in the good light from the west. Before long I crossed Carson Pass and started down the east side toward Hope Valley, an area with lots of aspen trees. My first stop was not far below the pass, where I found this weathered old roadside tree standing high above the upper valley, where aspens were changing color in the background.

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

Aspen Tree in Transition

October 20, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Aspen tree with leaves beginning to change from green to yellow

This fall I think I hit the timing just about perfect for aspen color, as I visited areas between Lake Tahoe in the north and Bishop Creek Canyon to the south. The colors were generally intense in the middle elevations, not completely gone yet at higher elevations, and beginning to come on strong down lower, where the aspens mix with cottonwoods and other foliage. By moving a bit north or south, or to higher/lower elevations, I was able to find just about every stage of the fall aspen color transition, from groves that were still green, though every phase of intermediate color, to bare trees that had already lost their leaves.

I was also reminded, yet again, that the specific spots you go to find Sierra fall color probably don’t matter as much as staying alert, thinking about the conditions, and watching for color wherever you happen to be. Yes, there are a few especially notable places. But it turns out that there are absolutely wonderful trees to photograph almost anywhere you travel at this time of year. This tree is perhaps a case in point. I was, in fact, in one of the prime aspen color areas near Lake Tahoe. However, on this evening, when the sun was dropping behind ridges and the light was softening, I simply happened to pull over at a wide spot in the road near some creek. I got out of my car to look at the trees, which were much like the trees filling the rest of this long valley, and it happened that one of them exposed the skeleton of its branch system against a background of mostly green leaves that were just starting to change. I’m quite certain that it would be nearly impossible for me to find this particular tree again — but why would I? It is just one of the uncountable trees in the range, and everywhere among them there are beauties to be photographed.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: california

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

Evening Light, Haze, Granite

Old Tree and Autumn Color, Sierra Nevada

Aspen Tree in Transition

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