Tag Archives: crack

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

Fractured Slab

December 16, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Stained and fractured rock slabs in the Yosemite National Park backcountry

This “intimate landscape” photograph of what is, objectively speaking, no more than a crack separating two pieces of granite actually tells a number of more interesting and complex stories. At least one of them is a story of the events of the day on which the photograph was made, while others are much older stories, bits of which can be seen in the rocks.

The story of this day involved wildfire. On the day we arrived at our camp in this area, the Yosemite “Meadow” fire took off in the area bounded roughly by Half Dome, Clouds Rest, and Mount Starr King. There was barely any smoke visible in the early morning, but as winds rose to surprising levels, the fire took off… and by late in the day the sky was filled with smoke that sometimes blotted out the sun and turned the sky an odd yellow-brown color. These rocks are stained a sort of reddish-brown, but the warm colors are enhanced a great deal by this smoky light. The older stories are complex and I cannot attempt to tell them completely here, but there are a few things to notice and think about in this rock scene. The area was glaciated, and the smooth rock surface at lower left and lower right is glacial polish, which provides evidence of the slow, grinding passage of an ancient glacier. The crack in the exfoliated granite provides evidence of other forces of weather that work slowly but irresistibly to weather and break up even this strong granite.

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.

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

Trees, Crack System

December 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A group of small trees find a marginal existence growing along a crack at the edge of an exfoliated slab of granite, Yosemite National Park

It took me three tries, on successive days, to finally get the photograph of this little bit of granite slab and trees that I was looking for. On evening of our first day camping in the vicinity we were under the thick smoke plume from the early September “Meadow” fire in Yosemite, which was burning some miles away in the Little Yosemite Valley area — but also sending dense smoke towards us and dropping ash from the sky. I did make a few photographs in this eerie light the first night, but it was a very tricky situation that did not work well for this subject. I went back on the second evening, when the smoke had diminished at our location to the point that it wasn’t a major factor in “intimate landscape” photographs like this one. I went to the top of a large granite bowl before the light was good and scouted for likely photographs to make as the evening light improved. I spotted this lengthy crack at the edge of an exfoliated granite slab, in which a number of small trees had taken tenuous root and decided that it could be an interesting subject with evening sidelight. I wasn’t the only one, however, and three members of our party had the same idea! We are a cooperative bunch, so I photographed some other things while my partners worked this spot, and then returned to set up a shot that looked more directly up the length of the crack that curves through the composition in this version. Later that evening I was quickly reviewing my shots from the day, and I realized that one of my buddies had cast a long shadow into part of the frame! Ah, well, such things happen.

So I made plans to go back yet again on our final evening in the area and try once more. In the end, I’m glad that I did. I’m now convinced that by going back I found a more interesting composition that accomplished several things. First, no one’s shadow is in the image! Second, I think that positioning the large crack so that it curves more diagonally through the frame works better than my original composition. Third, due to this different camera position and somewhat different light, I was able to let the shadow of the tree create a sort of mirror image of its form, resulting in a relationship between the tree and the shadow that I like. There are spots much like this one all over the place in Yosemite — smooth slabs of granite on which tiny but often mature trees manage to find just enough sustenance. In this little spot, a somewhat unusual number of these trees seem to have made a success of it.

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

Dry Mud and Sand

November 5, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A dry and curled layer of mud atop red sand in the bottom of a Utah canyon

It might be amusing for “normal people” to encounter a group of photographers in the bottom of a narrow Utah canyon, where the photographers might be found clustered attentively and enthusiastically around… dry mud. That was the case here, as a group of use suddenly halted our progress down a small (though much larger later on) canyon to set up tripods, fit just the right lenses, and spend about a half hour making photographs of mud.

However, as is often the case in landscape photography, it turns out that even dried mud may have a lot more going on than a casual glance would suggest. For people who are not particularly conscious of their “seeing,” it would be easy to walk past and think, “that curled mud is very interesting” and not pay much more attention to it. However, a bit of time spent in these narrow canyon walls teaches you to become alert to the possibility that you might be missing certain things. One bit of visual magic in these canyons happens during the middle part of the day, when the sun directly strikes the red rock canyon walls and reflects this red-saturated light down into the bottom of the canyon. Once you train yourself to see past what your visual system tells you it is seeing (brown mud) you can begin to see the intensely red coloration of this light and even begin to notice that there is a blue component where direct light from the open sky reflects off of some surfaces. And then, you may also find yourself intently focusing on making a photograph of a small patch of dry and cracked mud sitting atop red sand.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Plants, Canyon Wall

June 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Plants grow from thin cracks in the rock wall of a desert canyon, Death Valley National Park

I found this little scene in a well-known Death Valley Canyon, where the walls become vertical, hundreds of feet high, and quite close together. Canyons like this are some strange combination of beautiful — with soft light, colorful rock, shade — and harsh — with the clear evidence of flooding that periodically sweeps through and rearranges everything, against a backdrop of more typical aridity, and a terrain almost entirely consisting of rock.

In these places I am always intrigued by where and how plant life manages to survive. This is nowhere more true than in such canyons in Death Valley National Park, where the usual challenges are made worse by extreme heat and dryness. Here two kinds of plants have managed to find a foothold, but in must be a very tenuous one. The grow from thin cracks in solid rock, a good distance above whatever water comes during the periodic flooding of the wash, in an environment in which the light is most often muted yet in which extreme temperatures are common for much of the year.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: crack

Fractured Slab

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Dry Mud and Sand

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

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