Clouds of steam rise into the winter morning sky above Manhattan
It must have been a slow week in Manhattan. When we arrived at our Canal Street hotel on Christmas Eve day, they upgraded us to a better room and put us something like 20 floors up, in a room with huge windows with a view to the east over lower Manhattan. A week later, on the final morning of our visit, we were enjoying this view one last time before checking out and starting the process of heading back to the west coast. (First a few hours in Brooklyn, then a trip to JFK, then a long flight…) It was a cold early morning, not too long after sunrise, and there was a high shield of thin cloud to the east. The sun was coming in under these clouds at a low angle and back-lighting the rising columns of steam all over the city, so we made a few final Manhattan photographs through the window before heading out.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Trees, fog, and snow on the granite summit of El Capitan glow in a final beam of sunset light.
Near the beginning of March I was in Yosemite Valley for three days in conjunction with the opening of the Yosemite Renaissance XXIX exhibit. (One of my photographs is in the show.) It was a wonderful weekend in many ways. Lots of artists of all sorts were there for the opening—and for Yosemite!—and I had the chance to get together with many friends among them. It was also a time of atmospheric conditions that were spectacular in ways that interest me as a photographer – broken light, occasional rain, mist and clouds.
On this evening we went to Tunnel View since it was mostly gray down in the Valley and because there was some promise of not only drifting clouds and mist there, but also of some late day light. All of those things happened, but as the end of the day approached, the “lights went out” as the clouds to the west thickened and blocked the setting sun. I continued to shoot for a while, mostly focusing a long lens on small distant details within the scene, but I finally decided that the light was simply becoming too flat and I walked back to the car to pack up, thinking about the friends I would soon join for dinner in the Valley. At the back of the car I removed the long lens, collapsed the tripod, and was packing everything away when Patty, who was sitting the front seat and facing the valley, exclaimed, “Look at that light!” Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much, but when I looked up I saw a blood red band of light stretching across the cliffs of El Capitan on the left and Sentinel Rocks on the right. Apparently the sun had found a narrow gap in the clouds almost exactly at the point it reached the horizon far to the west. I immediately knew that this light would be gone very quickly—at best it might last a minute or two—so I worked very quickly to set up the tripod, attach the camera, and stick a long lens on it… not even looking up at the view as I worked. No time to look! I quickly moved the camera to the nearest possible shooting location and, working almost entirely intuitively, quickly picked out perhaps four different shots, each focusing on the momentarily best bit of light as the scene evolved quickly. The final bit of light was a rapidly fading stripe just across the snow- and cloud-shrouded summit of El Capitan, where the upper rocks, snow, and trees picked up the intense red light for a matter of a few seconds, and then it was gone.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Autumn sun rises through fog about California Central Valley marshland
I wanted to photograph migratory birds at sunrise in the San Joaquin Valley, so I was on the road from the San Francisco Bay Area shortly after 4:00 AM. As I drove it seemed like it might be a perfectly clear day, but on the last few miles of my drive I hit fog – thick enough fog to slow my progress considerably. I regard this as good news when I’m photographing birds out here, as drifting fog and mist makes for interesting conditions for photography, far more than clear skies.
I arrived at my destination, and the fog was so thick that I couldn’t see the morning light beyond the general increase in ambient light levels. However, as I stopped to see what birds might be about I noticed that the sun was barely visible through the low fog and some more distant clouds. At first it was so faint that it was possible to miss it, and as the fog drifted it occasionally completely muted the light of the sun. But after a few more minutes, as the sun rose higher the fog drifted and dissipated just a bit, and the globe of the rising sun become visible through the thick atmosphere, partially blocked by a layer of mid-level clouds.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Sunrise light illuminates overnight snow on Mt. Humphreys and peaks of the Sierra Nevada crest above the Buttermilks
This was the morning after a day of October snowfall up and down the Sierra Nevada. The previous day we had photographed in snow almost the whole day as we traveled east over Carson Pass, then via Monitor Pass to highway 395, and continued south past Walker, Bridgeport, Lee Vining, and Mammoth (where the snow finally let up) and on to Bishop. Photographing aspen color in the snow was a special treat, since it combined the autumn ritual of aspen chasing with the clear indication that the cold season was on its way, a message delivered by snow.
That night I realized that the snow would certainly coat the peaks of the eastern Sierra the next morning, so instead of heading straight up to photograph aspens, I decided that we would instead go to a place in the sage country above Bishop from which a great section of the eastern Sierra is visible, to see if we might get dawn light on the snow-covered mountains. We arrived – of course! – before sunrise, and the jury was still out. There were clouds floating over the crest and, more importantly, there were clouds high up in the White Mountains to the east. Mornings like this have the potential to either be a complete bust if the clouds block the early light, or to bring especially beautiful conditions if the dawn light finds a way to shine through breaks in the clouds. We got our breaks, and on top of that the clouds above the crest began to break up just as the sunlight arrived. In this photograph, a fluffy cloud has been considerate enough to momentarily park its peak-shaped form above Mt. Humphreys, a bit of light hits the peaks, a band of light lower down illuminates the base of the snow-covered escarpment, and a bit of reddish light even hits the nearer and darker foreground peak.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
