Tag Archives: country

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

Ridgetop Trees, Cloudy Sky

October 28, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A momentary break in a September storm lights ridgetop trees against a cloudy sky

In a way, I sneaked up on this stand of trees over a period of several days. A small group of us camped at a backcountry Sierra lake for about a week back in September. The experience of photographing in one limited area for this long is quite different from photographing while actively backpacking or while moving around by vehicle. Each morning one wakes up in the same place, and each morning one heads out into the same landscape, looking for new views of it or for subjects and locations that were not immediately apparent. We also have the opportunity to return to subjects more than once as the conditions change — different times of day, different atmospheric conditions, and so forth.

These trees stand atop a glacially carved ridge above “out” lake and between it and another similar lake below. The rocky terrain limits the growth of trees and they tend to stand apart from one another, often revealing more clearly the shapes of individual trees. I first saw this area and it trees very early on during our visit, and I climbed the low ridge a number of times. Near the end of our stay a storm swept in and we had on and off rain for a couple of day. I went out on this somewhat soggy day, alternately walking around the landscape and using that very landscape to hide from the intermittent showers that passed through. I hiked up the hill in the rain, using a thicker bit of forest for cover, and I emerged into the open as the clouds thinned a bit and the rain momentarily diminished, and the landscape lightened as weak sunlight shone. This clump of trees stands resolutely near the very top of the ridge.

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Home Away From Home

October 25, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

My camp for a week in the Yosemite backcountry, September 2015

For the past few years I have escaped to the mountains (or desert, in one case) each fall or late summer for uninterrupted photography. Perhaps a half-dozen years ago I was fortunate enough to be able to join up with the five photographers whose work appears in the book “First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite’s Wilderness.” The first year I more or less ran into the group (Charles Cramer, Scot Miller, Mike Osborne, Keith Walklet, Karl Kroeber) — they were on a pack-train supported weeklong-plus trip, and had backpacked in to the same area where I ran into them briefly. The next year I “crashed” their lengthy back-country trip for a few days; the following year I was still a backpacker (they used pack animals) but I joined them for the better part of a week. Since that time I’ve joined all or part of the group for a week or more each fall. (I’m grateful to all of them for welcoming me to join them.)

This year a smaller group of us spent a bit more than a week camped at a single Yosemite backcountry location. For someone with years of backpacking experience, typically moving from place to place each day, staying in one spot for so long has been a revelation. At first I wondered how in the world there will be enough to keep me busy for a week or more. Then half way through the trip I typically realize that I have just enough time to photograph the things I decide are important to work on, only to discover on the final day or two that I could probably actually use another half week or more! The photograph shows my backcountry home for a week this past September, at the end of a granite slab that extended almost all the way to the lake that was our home base.

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

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

Redrock Country, Near Fruita

June 27, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Cliffs and eroded towers near Fruita, Capitol Reef National Park

I’m a sucker for juxtapositions of mountains and cliffs, and sunlit and shadowed surfaces. (In fact, “juxtaposition” is a word I think about a lot when making photographs.) This part of the world provides these juxtapositions with a vengeance. Everywhere in the red rock country of the Southwest there are sandstone walls, lined up, building one on top of the other, standing in front of and behind each other, layered with eroded rock and soil, standing above valleys and beyond lower ridges.

We had only a brief time to photograph on this first afternoon in Capitol Reef National Park. I had arrived in the middle of the afternoon and then busied myself with setting up a tent and a few other camp chores, plus catching up on the news with my friend Dave. By the time all of these important things had been taken care of the sun was rapidly dropping toward the horizon, so we quickly headed to a nearby area to see what sort of late-day light we could find. Literally within minutes of leaving our campground (which is just to the right of the shadowed trees visible in the lower part of the photograph) we came upon this intense and saturated late-day light, with shadows starting to stretch across the valley and the low foreground ridges.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Ross’s Geese, Foggy Pasture

February 10, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Ross’s geese take off from a foggy San Joaquin Valley pasture

I’ve been out to the San Joaquin Valley quite a few times over the past few months, beginning in the last months of 2014, when there were not yet too many birds there, and as recently as a couple of weeks ago, when large numbers of geese and cranes had returned. (This was a bit of a relief, since many wondered where the birds had gone, especially after this string of drought years in California.)

Our visit to the valley on New Year’s Day was especially nice. Not only did a small group of us literally greet the dawn of the new year in the company of thousands of birds, but we were pleased to see the numbers of the birds had begun to increase again. Among them were the Ross’s geese, who appeared in rather large numbers. While the morning fog was still in the air, though thinning enough to let faint sun through, large groups of them had settled in on the pasture land. The birds were constantly coming and going, as new groups arrived and others left, and as they moved one spot to others nearby, often for reasons that I could not discern. In this photograph the large group still on the ground was in the process of leaving, with a new group taking to the sky every few moments.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: country

Ridgetop Trees, Cloudy Sky

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Home Away From Home

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Redrock Country, Near Fruita

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