Tag Archives: dense

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Burned Forest, Evening

August 14, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light on an eastern Sierra Nevada forest recovering from a recent wildfire.

This spot is in Mono County along highway 395 not far from June Lake, and it is a spot that I’ve had my eyes on for some time. As a person who was brought up in the “Smokey the Bear” era, when wildfires were thought to be entirely a bad thing, it took me a while to come to terms with the knowledge that such fires are a natural and necessary element. I understood this logically before I understood it aesthetically, and I struggled for some time with the idea that places where fires have occurred can be seen as sites of rebirth rather than as destruction and desolation.

I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity and the right light to photograph this burn area for a couple of years now. I pass by fairly often, but it has always been at the wrong time of day or at a time when I could not afford to stop. However, as is often the, unexpected coincidences caused me to be here just before sunset as the light turned golden in mid-August. Ironically, part of the cause was… a forest fire in Yosemite! Up in the Tuolumne area, the afternoon air had turned smokey and the light had taken on the sort of brownish color that forest fire smoke can create. This light was not inspiring me, so I thought that I’d drive over the pass and head south a short distance on highway 395 to see if I could find more interesting lighting. As I traveled south from Lee Vining I happened to notice the turn-off for West Portal Road, which heads out in the general direction of Mono Craters. I took this road and spent some time poking around, eventually making a few exposures in the area called Aeolian Buttes, and then returned to the main highway a bit south of where I had originally left the road.

As it happened, this choice dropped me onto 395 at a place where I could see this burned area just a bit further down the road. The sun was not far from dropping behind the Sierra crest, so I figured this could be my chance to give it a try. I found a spot where the late afternoon light was warming the color of the summer-dried grasses and some white flowers grew among the burned trees, and I had perhaps 15 minutes to work before the sun dropped behind the peaks.

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.

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

Forest Meets Meadow, Yosemite

July 31, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A small sunlit meadow filled with shooting star flowers meets the edge of a dense lodgepole pine forest, Yosemite National Park.

For some reason many of the photographs I made on my recent trip to the Yosemite high country seemed to focus on the trees and the forests, and perhaps a bit less on the rocky peaks and prominences of the park. This photograph was made in a place that is not “special” in the ways that specialness is often measured in this park. As far as I know, it has no name, though it is not too far from Olmsted Point. It is simply a little area like so many others in this part of the Sierra, but one that I feel a connection to now that I have revisited it on several occasions and gradually pushed out the boundaries of my familiarity with it.

I first stopped near this spot along Tioga Pass Road several autumns ago on an evening when fog blanketed the nearby ridges. Very close to this spot there was a break in the fog, and I could see the sunset light and its effect on the fog clouds, so I pulled over and made some photographs. A year or so later, now having an actual awareness that there was a pull-out at this spot in the road, I stopped again on a summer morning for no particular reason and saw that a faint trail headed off into the lodgepole forest that was mixed with glacial boulders. I walked a short distance out on this path and found a small pond that I photographed, and I filed the location away as one to investigate again later.

On this July’s visit, I put this spot on my agenda and made a plan to visit it early on morning after photographing first light on a nearby ridge. Because there is no single attention-grabbing icon at this spot, rather than leaving my car with a target in mind I wandered slowly into this forest and simply kept my eyes open. (And I tried not to think about the mosquitos that are always thick in the lodgepole forest at this time of year!) First I stopped at the pond that I had previously photographed; then I picked up that trail and followed it through the forest, past other ponds, and across some glaciated granite near the edge of this small meadow filled with shooting star flowers, with the light coming through the forest beyond.

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Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Forest, Gazos Creek

July 14, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Today I used the excuse of driving my son over the hill to UC-Santa Cruz for his summer school class to get in a short trip up the coast north of Santa Cruz. We are in the midst of the “June gloom” period along the coast of northern California, and the fog doesn’t clear until later in the day, and never does clear completely in some areas. As I left Santa Cruz the fog bank was visible but well off-shore, but as I travelled north I eventually encountered it right around Año Nuevo State Reserve.

I had a vague plan to check out Gazos Creek Road, having heard from some other photographers that there are interesting redwood trees and other subjects in that area. Since I still had some time, I turned up the road and it quickly narrowed as it followed the creek and the bottom of the canyon into the Santa Cruz Mountains. Since this was more or less a scouting trip, I drove all the way to the end of the road without stopping much, but on the way back down I decided to stop and make some photographs of this grove of new-grown coast redwoods mixed with the curving trunks of big leaf maple trees.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Courtyard, MOMA

June 13, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Black and white photograph of the courtyard of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, photographed through windows of the museum.

Sticking with the urban New York theme for at least one more day, this is another photograph shot from a window in the Museum of Modern Art and looking out over a courtyard and architecturally busy urban scene combining older brick and stone facade buildings with more modern and taller buildings.

There are subtle (or perhaps not so subtle?) reflections in the window through which I made the photograph. These reflections are one reason, though not the only one, that I decided to render this as a black and white image – some of the shadows had colorations that did not work for me. To my mind, this photograph is related to some others that I’ve made featuring views of and through the windows of modern buildings, including this photograph from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

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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.

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