Tag Archives: crest

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

First Light, Eastern Sierra

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First Light, Eastern Sierra
Pre-sunrise light on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

First Light, Eastern Sierra. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pre-sunrise light on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

As I queue up photographs for future posts this morning I seem to be alternating, in a way, between the ridiculous and the sublime. The previous image I posted was one of a broken pumpkin, cast aside next to the curb on the morning after Halloween. The photograph shown here comes from a rather different sort of morning, before dawn in a high place just below the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, awaiting the arriving of sunrise light on an autumn morning.

Photographs (and, arguably, especially landscape photography) is largely about the light. The great subjects are always there, and many of them stand still for hours, days, seasons, years. But the light is never really the same twice, even though we can recognize certain categories of light. One beautiful sort is the softly colored light that may appear just before sunrise when the conditions in the sky are just right to produce some color. I had arrived at this location quite early, having made a prior plan to photograph here, but I could not know exactly what the light would do. Although my plan was to photograph the first sunrise light on the tops of the peaks, it was this soft, early light that turned out to be the most fascinating.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening

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Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening
The last light of an autumn day falls across a group of trees in Owens Valley with the Sierra Nevada in the background.

Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last light of an autumn day falls across a group of trees in Owens Valley with the Sierra Nevada in the background.

Landscape photography often feels a bit like hunting to me. I may go to a particular location with a general sense that something worthwhile is likely to happen there — and that sense is often based on some combination of long-developed intuition and knowledge of the antecedent conditions and the current situation. But I often do not have a specific subject or composition in mind. (Sometimes I do, but that is less likely.) In other words, I believe that there is a good chance that I’ll find the sort of thing that appeals to me photographically… so I go to a place at a time because I think the odds are good I’ll find something interesting.

One result is that I have to be ready to discover, change plans, improvise, and respond quickly to whatever I discover. (It also means that there are occasional dead-ends, but I digress…) We went to this spot with something entirely different in mind, but within minutes of arriving I decided that the “something else” was not going to work… and I saw that the line of sunlight coming across Owens Valley was striking this group of trees and that I only had a moment or two to photograph before the light left them. I made an initial exposure in landscape mode, then switched to portrait mode when I noticed more light on the foreground than the background. In the end, I came away with two rather different photographs of these trees — in the landscape version they lie near the bottom of the frame with only more distance subjects above them, while here they are situated beyond the stretch of foreground plants and the distant peaks occupy less of the frame.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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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

Conifers and Autumn Aspens, Snow-Dusted Peaks

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Conifers and Autumn Aspens, Snow-Dusted Peaks
An early season dusting of snow above colorful aspen groves surrounding conifers.

Conifers and Autumn Aspens, Snow-Dusted Peaks. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An early season dusting of snow above colorful aspen groves surrounding conifers.

Some of you may be starting to feel a sense of loss as summer comes to an end, a nostalgia for those slow days of the warm season. I, on the other hand, am happy to see summer go. My two favorite seasons are coming! I love autumn with its sense of continuous change and the remarkable shows of fall color. And while winter may not be the most comfortable season, in many ways it is the most interesting, a time when we are reminded that sometimes the climate is a challenge.

This photograph comes from a few years back on a day that features one of my favorite sorts of early autumn days in the Eastern Sierra. This would be a day when the aspens are changing color and when an early winter-like weather front passes through and drops a dusting of snow on the highest peaks. (My other favorite type of Sierra autumn day is entirely different — the kind of sunny day when the sun retains some warmth, the light is soft, the colors are golden, and the backcountry is nearly deserted.) This photograph looks across a large grove of (mostly) aspen trees that leads up the eastern slopes toward high peaks with some of the newly fallen snow.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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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

Autumn Color and Sierra Crest Peaks

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Autumn Color and Sierra Crest Peaks
Early autumn color in a landscape of rock and forest below peaks on the east side of the Sierra Nevada crest.

Autumn Color and Sierra Crest Peaks. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early autumn color in a landscape of rock and forest below peaks on the east side of the Sierra Nevada crest.

This is, as some of you may notice, a portrait-orientation photograph of a scene that I recently shared using the landscape orientation. Why two different approaches, you may ask? That could be a bit of a complicated question, as there are multiple possible reasons. Heck, you might just wonder if I was able to make up my mind! In fact, this scene “works both ways,” I think. The landscape orientation goes with the long horizontal stretch of the distant ridge and the band of colorful aspens at the bottom, and it also reveals some additional color that lies outside of the vertical image to the right. On the other hand, I think that the vertical interpretation may do a better job of presenting the scale of the vertical rise from the foreground to those towering, distant peaks. I could go on, but I’ll end by pointing out that sometimes both orientations prove useful, so I don’t shy away from doing both.

The scene is a long canyon in the Eastern Sierra that rises from the hot, dry terrain of Owens valley, ascends a long river drainage that twists and splits and gradually transitions to subalpine forest, and finally culminates well into the alpine zone with its rocky terrain and high peaks. Canyons like this one can be good places to look for aspen color in the fall — for one thing, because they cover such a large elevation range there is likely to be color somewhere within them over a relatively long period of time.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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