Tag Archives: edge

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.

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

Rocky Shoreline, Lower Young Lake

July 12, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

Morning light shines through the forest on the rocky shoreline of Lower Young Lake, Yosemite National Park.

The three Young Lakes are among my favorite places in the Yosemite back-country, and I visit them pretty much every summer. As I did when I made this photograph, I most often to in the last season – I like to visit after Labor Day weekend, when the crowds begin to diminish, the weather is a bit cooler, fall colors begin, and everything in the Sierra seems to slow down in anticipation of the coming winter.

On this visit I camped for something like three nights at the lower lake, and thus had time to photograph throughout the basin at different times of day. On this morning I got up early as I usually do, and spent a good part of the morning photographing along the shoreline of this lake, starting in the area near where most people camp and where the trail passes along the shoreline. A bit later I crossed the outlet stream and followed the rocky shoreline around to the far shore where the forest opens into rocky meadows near the main inlet stream.

In the photograph, the early light is coming from behind the trees in the shoreline forest and glancing off the tops of the boulders on the shore and in the shallow water. There were two photographic challenges in making this photograph. First, the dynamic range between the brightest sunlit spots on the rocks and the darker areas in the forest is extreme. In some cases I might resort to blending multiple exposures as a way to deal with this issue, but here I was able to recover enough detail from a single frame. The second issue relates to the color of the light. Specifically, while the sunlit areas have a fairly warm quality, the light in the shadows on the rocks and in the shaded areas of the forest turns out to be distinctly blue in a photograph. In fact, these areas end up looking much more blue than you would think if you were there – this has to do with the way our minds process what we see to make it more like what we think it should be… if that makes any sense. In any case, the decisions here ended up being about how much blue would be the right amount.

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

Shoreline Grasses and Subalpine Pond

May 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

I made this photograph on a special afternoon late last July. Although I had been across Tioga Pass earlier in the season when it was still very snowy, this was my first real visit to the summer high country of the season. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon with just a few fluffy clouds floating about when I came to the meadows near Tioga Pass. The color of the meadow grasses was at just that perfect point that we think of when we imagine summer subalpine meadows – the intense green just before the wildflowers bloom and the inevitable change toward fall begins. (Yes, after some summers in the high country this cycle becomes clearer and clearer.)

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Monterey Cypress Trees, Fog, Carmel Peninsula

March 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Carmel Peninsula is barely visible though fog beyond Monterey Cypress trees along the north shore of Point Lobos State Reserve.

This was a typical summer day in coastal California – completely socked in by a thick, gray blanket of cold, wet fog! The light was somewhat dismal, so it wasn’t a day for typical “scenic” landscape or seascape photography, though the colors of the plants and trees were saturated by the soft light and the distant peninsula faded almost to monochrome though the fog across the bay.

These Monterey cypress trees grow along the tops of the rocky cliffs above this part of the Pacific Ocean, in some of the most exposed and precipitous locations imaginable. In some spots they are left exposed to the full force of the ocean winds and winter storms, and they grow close to the ground, following the contours of the rocky terrain in ways that remind me of trees growing in exposed locations near timberline in the Sierra. In other spots they are a bit more sheltered and they seem to be able to “stretch out” a bit, as these trees do along a section of the rocky cliffs that faces more into the bay than out to sea.

The bay holds the outlet of the Carmel River, and the peninsula visible across the water in the distance is the coastline of the town of Carmel. The foreground trees are within the boundaries of the Point Lobos State Reserve.

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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.