Tag Archives: detail

Photographs: Nature

Flower Detail

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Flower Detail
Macro photograph of the center of a delicately colored flower

Flower Detail. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Macro photograph of the center of a delicately colored flower.

A few weeks ago I accompanied the local flower photographer — the one I live with — to one of her favorite area botanical gardens where we spent a morning photographing flowers and plants. I’ve been having some fun with this recently, perhaps because i finally got the right lens for photographing this subject close-up!

Many things intrigued me about this flower. The remarkable patterns in the flower’s center, of course, were prominent. But working in soft light, at least partially created by using a scrim for shade, an amazing range of subtle colors became visible — it seemed at first like a white flower, but in this light the presence of tones ranging from blue to pink became clearer.

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 and Amazon.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Patterned Cliff Face, Detail

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Patterned Cliff Face, Detail
A small section of shaded Sierra Nevada cliff reveals remarkable details of dikes, fractures, color, and stains

Patterned Cliff Face, Detail. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small section of shaded Sierra Nevada cliff reveals remarkable details of dikes, fractures, color, and stains

Most often when I think of large rocky faces in the Sierra Nevada, the clean, smooth, and almost uniform faces of Yosemite granite come to mind — large expanses of nearly unbroken rock shaped by glaciers. However, when I get into the high country and the other areas of the range I am reminded that things aren’t quite so simple. In places you can find mountains cut through by giant dikes of non-granite rock, or you might encounter the remnants of more ancient layers that lay above the granite intrusions and today give us red, black and other colors of material.

Since I’m no geologist, I can’t explain the details of the face in this photograph, but I can share a few observations. It is the headwall of a high bowl that contains a subalpine lake, and the area does show signs of glaciation. The fact is gigantic, and this is just a small section. It is far from uniform, with mostly gray rock cut through by thick intrusions of lighter material, and the whole thing cracked and fractured. In many places the surface has been deeply stained as water has flowed or seeped across it.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Fractured Rock

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Fractured Rock
Detail of a fractured rock wall in the John Muir Wilderness

Fractured Rock. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Detail of a fractured rock wall in the John Muir Wilderness

There are quite a few “photographer jokes” that you’ll hear if you hang out long enough with these folks. (I should make a list sometime!) Some of them come up in answer to the common question, “What did you photograph?” (A variation on, “What are you photographing?” and not totally unrelated to, “Did you get anything good?”) In a lot of cases, when asked the “what did you photograph?” question, you have choices: given a long answer (often the truest response) and make your questioner wish they hadn’t brought it up, give a very short superficial answer, or make a joke. One joke answer among some folks I know and sometimes photograph with is a cheery, “Rocks, water, and trees!”

If you have been watching recent photographs from this location in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, you may be forgiven for noting that in some cases I seem to have been reducing the subjects from “rocks, water, and trees” down to the minimal, “rocks…” This is — obviously! — one such example. It is the sort of thing that most folks would probably not see, since it wasn’t in an obvious place and is in a location where you could easily walk past while looking at other, larger things. But I wasn’t looking for the obvious, at least not only for the obvious, so I stopped here and poked around a bit, discovering a small section on a larger rock fact where the remnants of an old layer of pink rock were gradually breaking away from the underlying gray material. One more thing — when I make a photograph like this one, focusing on some compositional aspect of some small and non-iconic thing, I often think of the photographs of Mike Osborne, one of the original “First Light” photographers and a person with a unique and wonderful way of “seeing” the Sierra Nevada landscape.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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 and Amazon.
Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Cliff Face, Detail

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Cliff Face, Detail
Abstract forms and colors of a weathered and stained Sierra Nevada cliff

Cliff Face, Detail. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Abstract forms and colors of a weathered and stained Sierra Nevada cliff

As I do almost every summer, I headed into the Sierra Nevada backcountry with a group of friends and photographers over the past week and a half of so. The group has been doing this since about 2001, and I began to work with them nearly a decade ago, eventually moving from showing up as a solo backpacker for a few days to participating fully in the visits. Typically we get packed in to a location with lots of photographic possibilities — a pack string brings in a lot of the gear, while we typically carry in our camera equipment. Once set up we can “work” the surroundings intensively, looking more deeply into the landscape and viewing it in various conditions and light. This provides us with special opportunities to learn the nearby landscape more intimately than if we were just passing through or hiking in and out each day. Equally important, as we live and work together for a week we form a very special little photographic community.

This year we were (again) in the John Muir Wilderness of the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Every place has its own visual personality. In this location high mountains surrounded us and produced several hours of soft, shaded light in the morning and evening, with fill light reflected from surrounding peaks rising into the sunlight…