Tag Archives: dead

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Three Snags, Unnamed Sierra Cliff

October 14, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Three dead snags on a small ledge catch the late afternoon light at the base of a huge, shadowed cliff of crumbling granite.

I returned to the area near this cliff face almost daily during our mid-September photography trip to this region of the Kings Canyon National Park back-country. The area was rich with photographic subjects – sub-alpine ponds and larger lakes, late summer golden meadows, granite slabs and boulders, individual trees and forest, the surrounding slopes and cliffs, and the summits of ridges and peaks beyond. We photographed here morning and evening, and in sun and rain and clouds. Although we were in the area of almost a full week, we could easily return for another week and find plenty more to photograph.

This rugged and broken bit of cliff face had intrigued me before I thought to photograph it this way. It rose above the far end of the largest lake in this area, with talus slopes at its base and a higher ridge above. Beyond it other faces and slopes rose into a higher valley that was topped with very high and fractured ridge. At this late time in the summer season, the face was in shade in both the early morning and evening hours, with only some areas struck by light slanting across from one side or the other. While looking at the face I noticed a small group of three bare snags standing in the sun at the lower right and though that I might be able to contrast them with the larger rocky face, and include them as a way to suggest the large scale of the cliffs. The blue tones are, of course, because the rocks are in shadow, though some reflected light adds a glow to some of the rocks facing toward the left. This photograph may be a bit difficult to make sense of at a small web size, but my intention is to print it very large so that the details will be more visible.

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: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Cottonwoods, Meadow, and Stumps

July 11, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Stumps of dead brush in a meadow with autumn cotton wood trees, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

We encountered these first autumn-foliage cottonwoods shortly after we entered this canyon, and this being our first day shooting in this area, I think we (or at least I) felt obligated to shoot every possible subject, since everything was so new on this day. Later I might have passed up these cottonwoods which, despite their brilliant color, were it a tricky spot to photograph and were just about to end up in the direct morning sunlight.

Trying to find some sort of composition that could include them but not make them the whole story, I first saw the brushy meadow with its light green grasses and older dry grass, but that was too featureless of a foreground for what I had in mind. Then I saw these old dead stumps of perhaps tamarisk or some other desert plant that were still standing in a section of this meadowy area, and I decide to use them to fill the foreground.

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

Dried Branch, Sand

April 10, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

The dry remnants of a dead plant in recently wind-blown sand dune, Death Valley National Park

I have been visiting Death Valley regularly for perhaps fifteen years, typically photographing there for nearly a week every year for the past decade, and occasionally more. On my most recent trip, from which I returned only days ago, I was thinking about a number of thing regarding my experience with the place and how it has changed. On my first visits there was, of course, the excitement and wonder of discovering a place that was essentially completely new to me. I recall that on my first trip there I got close to the Race Track without going all the way to this location. We camped not far from that playa and I imagined this place that I had heard so much about and even envisioned it in a particular location – and when I did visit a year or two later I discovered that it was quite a bit different from what I imagined, though magical in different and perhaps more powerful ways. After a few years of visiting and photographing the best known iconic sites I began to find them less interesting, and though I continued to photograph them when the opportunity arose, I focused more on expanding the areas I knew about and on looking more closely at areas I thought I knew.

As I did this, I have to confess that portions of the Death Valley experience baffled me or even put me off a bit. While I found some of the terrain to be tremendously beautiful, there were other aspects that I just couldn’t quite relate to. As a person who has spent a lot of time in forested places with flowing water – mainly the Sierra Nevada – I found some areas of this desert to be, quite honestly, boring. I drove through or past them on my way to what I thought of as the more interesting places where I could find colors outside of the range from tan to gray and where some special object or formation might create an obvious center of interest. However, from time to time I would be surprised to find in some plain, nondescript, and even boring place an experience of stillness, immense space, and deep silence that I had rarely encountered elsewhere. More and more, I began to see this as a primary attraction of this landscape – more so in many cases that the specific features of this pinnacle or that formation or the other valley.

On this recent trip, conditions conspired to make me look more closely at some of these things that I had originally overlooked. The conditions were such that if I had experienced them a few years ago I might have simply left. (In fact, that thought did cross my mind once or twice on this trip.) The spectacular light really never came, skies were cloudy, the air was hazy, it was very hot, the winds blew strongly, and there was a dust storm. During the first couple of day, with the exception of shooting the dust storm, many of the subjects I had in mind simply didn’t work out the way I planned. A bit surprisingly, without the possibility of shooting yet another beautiful golden hour sunset image of a spectacular bit of geography (though I did do some of that still) I slowed down and looked more closely at some of those “boring” places that I had passed through more quickly in the past.

This photograph was made in one of those locations. It was not far from one of those iconic locations, but it wasn’t the iconic spot at all. An hour or so before sunset I simply wandered away from the road, past vegetation and into the sand, and started looking around. In the low spots between dunes, the world beyond was out of sight and the wind was blocked, and as the light faded I encountered again that deep and powerful and timeless silence that is so hard to find almost anywhere else.

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

Colorado River, Dead Horse Point

February 6, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The canyon of the Colorado River, from Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah

The light was a bit tricky when we drove out to Dead Horse Point to look at the famous view of the Colorado River as it loops below huge cliffs at the edge of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. It was nearing the middle of the day, so the soft morning and evening light was nowhere to be found. It was also hazy, with the slightly opaque air taking on distinctly blue colors. For all of these reasons, and also perhaps as a nod to old school landscape photography, I went with a black and white rendition of this photograph.

This is a truly remarkable bit of terrain. First, in the bottom of the canyon the Colorado River negotiates and abrupt horseshoe bend here beneath the tall cliffs leading up to the “Island in the Sky” portion of Canyonlands National Park. Above the river are a series of huge terraces form as the river eroded its way though the deep and old layers of sedimentary rock that characterize this area. Shooting with a slightly long focal length, I was able to eliminate most extraneous subjects and crop tightly around this area of massive cliffs and terraces.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: dead

Three Snags, Unnamed Sierra Cliff

Cottonwoods, Meadow, and Stumps

Dried Branch, Sand

Colorado River, Dead Horse Point

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