“September Rain” — A late-season rain shower over Sierra Nevada crest peaks and a stand of trees.
This photograph comes from that wonderful late-season time when the crowds diminish, the temperatures drop, things seem to slow down, and there are clear signs that the summer weather is coming to an end. I had gone to the Sierra just east of Yosemite for a few days of camping and photography. The weather was cold and blustery, and the sky was spitting rain as I set up my tent.
With camp set up, I had time to look around and notice the veil of rain draped across the rugged features of this nearby mountain, lit by soft light coming through the showers. I walked a short distance from my camp, found some interesting foreground trees, set up, and made this photograph before the rain arrived in camp.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
A late-summer storm sweeps over high mountain terrain, Eastern Sierra Nevada.
My favorite time of year in the Sierra Nevada high country is right now — roughly between mid-September and mid-October or a bit later. I love the place all year, wonderful stuff happens during this season. The overbearing crowds of summer are mostly gone — and I can just show up and get a campsite! The sun is often still warm, but its intensity has diminished. The light trends toward warm and soft and golden. Fall colors arrive and, of course, we sense winter out there on the seasonal horizon. These last easy, warm days seem even more precious as they come to an end yet again.
On the other hand, this transitional period brings surprises including cold, rain, graupel, hail, wind, snow… all of which I experienced on a few recent late-September days. I made this photograph from my camp at 9000’+ of elevation just outside Yosemite’s eastern border. Shortly after I set up my tent the sky darkened and soon rain, hail, and graupel arrived. The trees on this rocky prominence we in the last bit of soft light before the storm arrived and I took cover.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
I’ll say good bye to 2014 with a few sunset photographs this week. Recently I had reasons to go back through over a decades worth of photographs, including many that I have not shared. While this is certainly work, it is also occasionally a source of wonderful surprises — as seeing the older photographs triggers memories of photographic adventures that I haven’t thought about for a while and as I “discover” photographs that have sat in the raw file archives for many years. They get left there for a range of reasons. Sometimes I just didn’t yet “see” them the right way at the time I made them, or in other cases I got busy before I finished working my way thoroughly through a set of images and I moved on too soon. (This may be yet another reason to be conservative when it comes to deleting “unneeded” files!)
This photograph came from the very end of several days of photographing fall color in the eastern Sierra. It was a special few days, as there was light snow and wonderful color for most of the time I was there, and these conditions had me shooting around the clock, from before sunrise until it was too dark to make more photographs. On this final day I did some shooting in the eastern Sierra near Lee Vining in the late afternoon and finally decided that I was finished and that it was time to start back home through Yosemite. In the early evening light I headed up Lee Vining Canyon toward Tioga Pass, and as I drove by Ellery Lake I found these lovely conditions: new snow on the ground, golden hour light on the peaks and reflected in the surface of the lake, a nearly full moon rising above the shoulder of the high peaks, into blue sky slightly streaked with thing lines of clouds, and the complex symmetries of curving ridges. I couldn’t have asked for a better benediction to mark the final photographs of this trip.
The autumn mood rises over recent snow on ridges above Ellery Lake near the eastern edge of Yosemite National Park
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
A lone fisherman casts into Ellery Lake beneath ridges rising through haze toward the Sierra Nevada crest
This photograph includes a subject that I’ve stopped and looked at many time, thinking there must be a photograph in it somewhere – and even trying to photograph it a few times – but never quite figuring out how to see it. Ironically, it was the wildfire haze and smoke that made it work for me this time, as that haze muted some of the over-abundance of fine detail that I think can distract from the larger form in this scene, and which also muted the bright reflections on the water which can otherwise be hard to manage.
I thought of this as monochrome image when I made it. (I don’t always know that at the time of exposure, but with digital we have the luxury of making that decision later if necessary.) My first thought was to make it a “natural” landscape, but I noticed that a fisherman had appeared along the left end of the foreground peninsula. Often my first reaction to the appearance of a person in my landscapes is to wait for the person to move. But I have learned that sometimes a very small figure in the landscape can change the image in ways that seem oddly out of proportion to the size of the figure. Here, especially in a larger print, the little figure against the background of the shining water changes everything, I think. Place the tip of your finger over that person to cover him, and see if you see what I mean. I did also continue to make a few more exposures after he left, but I like this one the best.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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