Tag Archives: coast

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

Young Elephant Seals

May 27, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A group of young elephant seals along the California coast

Back in mid-February we took a day to make a very long looping drive from the San Francisco Bay Area down to almost Morro Bay and then back up the coast highway along the Big Sur coastline. The plan was to both visit the elephant seal areas near the southern end of this drive and to also look for landscape photography opportunities. Starting out early in the morning, it looked like the rainy weather to our north might not follow us south… but we were wrong. It was cloudy the whole way down, and when we arrived at this coastal elephant seal “nursery” it rained intermittently. Sometimes rain can be wonderful for landscape photography, but somehow this rain wasn’t quite playing out that way, so we focused on the wildlife instead. (Later, the weather did offer up some very interesting light as the weather began to break further up the coast.)

The area where I photographed these elephant seals is a well-known one right along the highway and, as expected, there were quite a few other people there to get close up looks at these impressive creatures. At this time of year there are large bulls, nursing mothers, young animals (that appear to me to be more or less adolescents), and nursing pups. Compared to certain times of the year when the bulls are jousting and fighting, things seemed rather calm. For the most part the seals seemed to largely be lounging around on the sand. We walked the opposite direction from the large crowd and found some good overlooks from which the seals could easily be photographed with long lenses. In places there were groups of these younger animals clustered closely together, presenting an image that seemed anthropomorphically “cute.” But don’t be fooled – these are pretty tough creatures that seem to lead a tough and challenging life.

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Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Fog and Forested Ridges

May 9, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter fog envelops forested ridges near Mount Tamalpais on the Pacific coast north of San Francisco

I photographed this scene on an early February day when the atmosphere was especially murky north of San Francisco. I had traveled this way for the day with some very general ideas about photographic subjects, but once I got “there” quite a few of those ideas looked a lot less promising. I had initially thought about photographing inside the coastal redwood forest, but when I arrived at my intended location I found that everything was gray, gray, gray! The atmosphere was hazy and murky and high clouds blocked any interesting light from the sun. So figured I might try for something moody along the coast, but there I found the same very difficult light.

I finally headed back up into the Marin hills, hoping that I might get up above the thickest of the gray and possibly get some light filtered through the high clouds and perhaps some longer views. As I entered the Mount Tamalpais State Park and started to ascend the road toward the peak, I finally came out of the coastal fog – though the overhead clouds remained. As I went up this road I looked for spots with some sort of longer view of the fog bank from which I had just emerged, and I finally found it along a bend where the road passed an area of open meadows and rolling hills. Here there was a line of sight back toward the ocean – completely obscured by fog – and the bits of lower hills that were poking through the tops of the clouds. On a technical note, this is not a monochrome or black and white photograph. It is, however, somewhat desaturated. One of the side effects of this difficult atmosphere was a very blue quality to the light that became much more apparent in the photograph than it appeared to a viewer on the scene. I knew I would have to deal with this in post in order to get an effect that seemed appropriate and believable. My initial thinking was to actually make it a black and white photograph, but as I worked with the image I came to feel that it worked better if some degree of muted color was retained.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Redwood Forest Light

April 24, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Misty morning light shines through coast redwood forest, Northern California

On this late-March morning I headed north over the Golden Gate Bridge, hoping to photograph the trillium bloom at Muir Woods National Monument. Every year this event seems to sneak up on me, and I often just barely catch it before the bloom ends or even miss it. I had heard that the flowers were already in bloom a week earlier, so I wasn’t sure what I would find – but I did get the chance to photograph these flowers that seem to announce the arrival of spring in the redwood forest.

There is a particular trail at this National Monument where I usually go to find the trillium flowers. They seem to like the slightly more open light of this hillside trail, and as I ascend it I usually find quite a few of the flowers… if I arrive at the right time. Every so often I remind myself to look in the other direction, too, since there the hillside drops off steeply, running all the way down to the creek at the bottom of the canyon. The elevated perspective provides a somewhat unusual view into the forest. One challenge of shooting redwoods is that so often you are angling the camera/lens up, and consequently have to deal with various challenges including bright sky appearing in the scene and the effects of converging perspective line. But from this trail it is possible to point the camera horizontally and shoot right into the forest itself, far above the base of the trees down in the canyon below.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Canyon Light, Big Sur

April 23, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

A solitary tree stands on a hillside at the base of a rugged canyon filled with morning light and haze

I have driven past this canyon many times, even stopping to hike up into it on more than one occasion. I’m usually there in the morning, when the early sun is just clearing the top of the high ridge beyond the canyon, and backlight streams down into the canyon, sometimes so bright that it is almost impossible to look up into it.

This was one of those mornings. As I got to the Monterey Peninsula I was initially surprised by the amount of haze in the air, since it was supposed to be – and actually was! – a very windy day. This was good news, though, since I love atmosphere that is not crystal clear. A few fog clouds were trying to form over some of the higher hills, but mostly the air was just filled with this semi-opaque, luminous haze that gave form to the light passing through it. As I arrived at this spot I looked to my left out of habit and first thought that it might be too hazy to produce a photograph that showed the faint details that I was interested in. But since I was there and this was a lot more interesting than the view out over the ocean, I stopped and took a look, soon finding a composition that placed the solitary tree silhouette near the bottom of the frame and anchored the scene, the rest of which was very atmospheric and subtle.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: coast

Redwood Forest Light

Canyon Light, Big Sur

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