Tag Archives: cliffs

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

Canyon Light

November 25, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Warm reflected light filters into the depths of a Utah slot canyon

I’m somewhat new to the world of Utah slot canyons, but I’m also increasingly enthusiastic about them and their photographic potential. I have not visited some of the iconic “big name” slots (and I may or may not do so), but I have found similar experiences in other locations. During my recent Utah visit I had thought about exploring a particular area in southwest Utah. I had a few place names in mind, but I really did not know much about them in any detail. (I often prefer to not know too much about these places, preferring instead to discover them on my own.) This canyon has a name that I had heard before, so one morning I decided to head out that direction and see what I could discover.

I drove down a gravel road, parked, loaded up camera equipment and a snack, and headed down a broad wash into the upper part of the valley though would eventually narrow and become a slot canyon. While it is no doubt more efficient to begin closer to such canyons, I enjoy the process of moving from the wider valleys to the narrower canyons, and the walk down the meandering path of the stream above the narrow canyon was enjoyable. Inside the narrow section the walls rose vertically, the canyon floor was often quite wet, and beautiful soft light filtered down from above, reflecting the warm reddish colors of the rocks and highlighting their shapes and patterns.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Rocky Shoreline, Fog, Big Sur

July 5, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Steep cliffs fall to the edge of the Pacific Ocean along the fog-shrouded Big Sur coastline

I left very early on this Fourth of July morning, while the streets were still nearly empty near my home, and headed south towards Monterey and the Big Sur coast. I watch weather forecasts carefully before going there this time of year. The most likely conditions are not my favorites for photography — either socked in with coastal for or else blue-sky clear. I’m looking for something in between in the summer, which ideally means that there is still some fog around but that the sun is poking through along the edges. The forecast today was one of those that is peculiar to California, with fog hugging the coast early but breaking up by midday and the temperatures in the inland areas, which are sometimes only a few miles from the foggy areas, rising into the nineties. Hoping to find that sun/fog boundary, I was willing to chance the holiday traffic, though I figured I might beat the worst of it by going there before “normal people” were awake, and then by returning at about the time the crowds would show up.

I hit fog in the Salinas Valley, which meant that the fog on the coast was likely to be a bit more obstinate about leaving than I had hoped. In fact, there was a low deck of fog perhaps only a few hundred feet above the ocean, with misty atmosphere below. This is not easy light to photograph, at least not for me, but I found a few places like this one where I could get a clear view of nearby subjects and include more distant subjects disappearing into the fog. I walked out on the bluff to find this spot, set up, and noticed that the fog was in motion, so I decided to wait, eventually spending perhaps 20 minutes waiting and watching for moments like this when the fog thinned just enough to barely reveal the further rocks and coast.

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

First Light, Red Rock Cliffs

May 18, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First morning light shines on plants along a red rock ridge at the base of a cliff-lined amphitheater in the Kolob Canyons area of Zion National Park

This photograph was made in the Kolob Canyon area of Zion National Park, a less-developed area of the park, accessed by a dead-end road and with virtually no services aside from a small ranger station near the entrance. Being a good distance from the main, popular destination of Zion Canyon, far fewer people seem to visit this area. We visited on a very cold fall morning, arriving well before the sun light had worked its way down into the canyons.

In may places there are very tall cliffs to the east, and sometimes, as here, they form amphitheaters of red rock. As we came to this part of the canyon, the sun had risen high enough that some of its light was able to find a way down into the canyon and begin to pick off ridges, aretes, and bit of vegetation – though the main cliffs still remained in shadow.

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

Aspens, Boulder Mountain, Evening

May 1, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn aspens in front of rugged landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah

This was an especially beautiful evening on the shoulder of the Boulder Mountain area of Utah. Six months earlier, on our first visit to this state, we had passed over Boulder Mountain early in April, before the spring leaves had appeared on the tremendous aspen groves found here. I imagined that this must be quite a sight in the fall when all of those aspens would inevitably change to yellow and gold and red and orange. With this in mind we planned our fall visit to cross this area again in early October, figuring that this would be about the right time for fall color.

It turns out that we probably missed the absolute peak of color – partly because the change happens on a slightly different schedule in these Utah mountains than in “my” Sierra Nevada, and because the transition seemed to occur a bit early this year, perhaps due to dry conditions earlier in the year. When we arrived we found that at the highest elevations the trees were already devoid of leaves. However, as we passed around the shoulder of the range to turn toward Torrey, we came upon some extensive and beautiful stands of colorful trees just before sunset and stopped to make photographs. This photograph looks across nearby aspens in the shadow of high clouds and beyond to the sandstone terrain in the area between Capitol Reef National Park and the small town of Boulder, an area that we finally got to investigate a few days later after crossing over the high country of Capitol Reef. At the time I made this photograph there was a nice soft haze – my kind of conditions! – and high clouds to the west were creating a lightscape alternating shadows and sun that played across the terrain.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: cliffs

Canyon Light

Rocky Shoreline, Fog, Big Sur

First Light, Red Rock Cliffs

Aspens, Boulder Mountain, Evening

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