Tag Archives: early

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

Evening Forest, Yosemite Valley

May 10, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early evening light filters through forest, Yosemite Valley, California.

I’m probably not alone in loving the early evening forest light, as the sun’s light filters horizontally between the trees just prior to dropping below the horizon or nearby ridges. As I wandered along looking for dogwood blooms, I passed a section where the forest thinned a bit beyond the nearest trees, and allowed a bit more light to hit the trees. I only had a few moments to make this photograph before the light ended.

This is one of many examples of how the light changes everything. In the middle of the day these trees would seem gray and the light would be harsh – dark shadows would make it very difficult to photograph in an interesting way. But here the light coming from behind the dogwood leaves and brush makes it glow, and the late-day warm color of the light turns those gray trees all sorts of interesting shades of brown.

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

Desert Mountains, Pre-Dawn Haze

April 28, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Desert mountain ridges in pre-dawn “blue hour” light rise above Death Valley and recede to highest peaks in the distance

On this April 2013 visit to Death Valley I encountered some very challenging light situations. What you hope for on an early morning like this is beautiful, colorful dawn light, perhaps preceded by a warm pre-dawn glow and followed by bright morning light. But when it came to beautiful early morning light – and evening light, too – I got precious little of it this time. On two mornings a thin overcast and atmospheric haze pretty much killed the dawn light. On one other morning I got some light, but still had to deal with the haze. The clouds were with me on a couple of the evenings, too. I have sort of learned to pretty much go with this flow and accept that difficult light as the balance in the universe that gave me, and will give me again, astonishingly beautiful light.

However, even in such light I try to see what I can find to shoot, and sometimes it provokes me to see things that I might otherwise have overlooked completely. On this morning I was up well before dawn and I headed off to a specific location that I had scouted earlier. I had two possible sorts of photographs in mind for this spot. One involved the view back down and across the main valley, and the other was planned around the arrival of first light on these rugged and stratified hills along the west side of the valley. I got to my spot, was relieved to find that the air was fairly still, and I settled in to wait for the dawn… which never quite came. It was so murky and the light was blocked by so many clouds to the east that I wasn’t even really quite certain when dawn occurred. Things got lighter… but remained hazy. I made this photograph at a moment when, on a clearer morning, these hills might have begun to assume a warm colored glow from light in the eastern sky. But this time it was all blue. The hazy sky was blue, and the mountains were as well. Since the conditions were somewhat unusual, I went ahead and made some exposures. When I first looked at the results I wasn’t very thrilled. But as I looked at them more, especially at very large sizes, I began to appreciate the softer and lower-contrast lighting and the way that details in the formations of the mountains actually become quite visible.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

White Pelicans, Fog

January 25, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small flock of white pelicans huddles together in pre-dawn fog, San Joaquin Valley, California

This band of pelicans – or at least I assume it is likely the same group – is becoming familiar to us, since we find them in about the same spot each time we visit this particular location in the San Joaquin Valley. We don’t always see them right away, but they are often here in the morning close to when we arrive before dawn, and they often show up here later in the day, too, or at a nearby low island in the marsh.

We looked for them when we arrived and passed that small island but did not see them. Other birds were there, perhaps some kind of gulls. So we moved on and looked for cranes whose cries told us they were about even before we saw them. We stopped along the levee road to photograph these sandhill cranes taking flight right around dawn, and at about this time we first saw a smaller than usual group of the white pelicans in the water to our east. I had a few minutes to photograph them before they suddenly took flight and left. In this photograph they appear against the backdrop of the morning fog and mist that was tinted slightly pink by the early light as fog rose from the waters of the marsh.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Granite and Snow

October 16, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early autumn snowfall on ledges of a cracked granite wall near North Lake.

This was a cold photograph! After the 2011 early October sequence of surprise snow storms, I headed up to the North Lake area as soon as the road was (barely) passable, arriving to find nearly a foot of snow in some places. Needless to say, the series of storms had not been kind to the aspen color – many of the most colorful leaves had been blown down, others had turned black, and much of what remained was inaccessible or caked with snow.

I initially thought about taking advantage of the relatively small number of photographers who had shown up and photographing the classic view from near the outlet, but I decided that it would be more interesting to take advantage of the unusual snow conditions. With that in mind, I set out to walk the road alongside the lake. Next to this road the hillside rises and eventually becomes quite rocky, in places starting to seem almost like cliffs. In one of these areas I came across this bit of cracked and shattered granite, sparsely covered with lichen and with new snow resting on small ledges.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: early

Evening Forest, Yosemite Valley

Desert Mountains, Pre-Dawn Haze

Granite and Snow

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