Tag Archives: fall

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

Granite, Falling Water

May 31, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A spring creek cascades across dark fractured granite, Yosemite National Park

Yosemite’s Tioga Pass Road (Highway 120), which passes through the park and across the Sierra crest at Tioga Pass, opened earlier than usual this year. It was not the earliest recorded opening, but the very small snow pack of the winter season meant that in early May it looked much more like a typical June. There was some snow left on the ground, but rather than being the deep and compacted remains of months of winter snow it was mostly what was left from a single spring storm a few days earlier.

In a more typical year, a drive over this route on the opening weekend provides an experience that is, to my way of thinking, mostly about water. Not only do we get to see vast remaining snow banks holding water that will irrigate the Sierra for months to come, but the spring melt brings wild, watery scenes nearly everywhere. Waterfalls and creeks appear in places where there is almost no evidence of their existence weeks or months later. Creeks spill across the highway flood sections of it. Larger creeks and rivers overflow their banks and turn meadows into lakes. But not this year. The photograph features a small section of a larger cascade which bounces down a steep and rugged section of granite boulders. Beautiful as it is, it should look like this in late June rather than early May.

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.

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

Horsetail Fall

March 11, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Horsetail Fall in afternoon light, Yosemite Valley

As you may already know, Yosemite Valley’s Horsetail Fall draws visitors and especially photographers ever winter, roughly during the last half of February or so. During this period a miraculous conjunction of sunset light, a gap in the ridges to the west, and a wispy waterfall dropping over the edge of El Capitan may produce a momentary “natural firewall” for those positioned to the east of the waterfall. The sight is quite something… but in some ways it is almost more amazing to encounter hundreds of people who have traveled great distances to stand in cold or even snowy meadows to gaze upwards in hopes of seeing this ephemeral light.

I have photographed it in the past so I generally do not photograph it any more. In fact, I like to joke that one of the nice things about Horsetail Fall is that it clears the rest of the Valley of photographers in the evening! ;-) I must have confused at least a few people when I was there on the first day of March, at a time when people are still hoping to catch the phenomenon. We pulled into one of the two popular areas for viewing the fall, but in the late afternoon, well before the light was even hinting at what it could do later on. I looked up at the cliff high above and saw that recent rains had brought the fall to life, and that winds across the upper face of El Capitan were blowing the fall too and fro and carrying its wispy spray in all directions. The rock face was uniformly damp, and the late afternoon light was bright and silvery on the rock. I put a long lens on the camera and pointed it up toward this bright subject and made a few exposures as the wind whipped the falling water back and forth. Then I packed up and left… just as the evening throng of photographers was arriving and finding their positions to photograph what they hoped would be colorful sunset light.

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

Winter Fog, Waterfall, and Trees

March 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Fog rises from Yosemite Valley to obscure the view of forest and waterfall

There is so much to write about this photograph – about the place itself, about what happened on this morning and at this moment, about the feeling of this subject, about the idea of making a photograph with so little detail, and even about some technical stuff. However, I’ll try to keep this relatively short… for now.

I made this photograph on the morning after the opening of the Yosemite Renaissance XXIX exhibit in The Valley. Because of this event, there were quite a few photographers in the Valley, including a number of friends, and it seemed like most everyone planned to be out early on this morning to make photographs. My morning plans are often a bit vague – sometimes as vague as “I’ll get up early and see if there is any winter fog around” – and that was the case this day. It was overcast, but I thought that it was possible that either some light might appear from the east or that there might be mist and fog cloaking the upper ridges around the Valley. In any case, we eventually ended up a the famous (or infamous, depending upon your point of view! ;-) Tunnel View, where others we knew were already set up. A favorite winter subject in the Valley is the fog, whether it is seen close up as it floats in front of you in one of the meadows or seen from above from a high point such as Tunnel View. I put a long lens on my camera and began to focus mostly on the fog among the trees on the Valley floor.

This fog almost seems like a living thing, constantly in motion and evolving in unexpected ways. One moment there may be little of it, but within moments it thickens and drifts into view. Or it may drift unexpectedly into the Valley from behind you. It rises up the cliff faces, momentarily obscures and then reveals features, and sloshes back and forth across the Valley. For the most part on this morning it seemed to be drifting among the forest trees, occasionally filling nearly the whole floor of the Valley. As we photographed, the fog moved in our direction along the Valley floor, and then suddenly but silently rose to cover our position, its cold and damp body momentarily limiting our view to a few feet in front of us. I turned my attention, and my camera, downwards toward the trees immediately below the overlook since they were still somewhat visible, and as the fog began to thin once again Bridal Veil falls became momentarily visible once again above the soft edge of the fog.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Memorial Pool

January 25, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Memorial pool at the National September 11 Memorial, New York City.

It is hard to know precisely what or how to write about this place as it evokes so many responses of all different sorts. On that September day over a decade ago we were on the opposite coast, watching the events unfold as if in a dream. A year and a half earlier we had stood on top of these buildings at night. Since then my oldest son has moved to New York and now works within a very short distance of this place. Our first visit to the site was a few years ago, when almost all original traces of the September 11 events were gone (though if you looked closely you could see chips and cracks in places), and it had become an incredibly busy construction site, with more cranes than I had ever seen in one place and with the new tower climbing skyward. It was hard to connect what we saw on that visit to what had occurred – until we walked around a corner and saw a memorial to firefighters from the closest fire station.

This time we first walked here on Christmas morning. We didn’t pick that day for any particular reason except that we were not far away and it seemed like a place that we wanted to visit. We walked down, looked up at the new tower through trees, and walked back. The next day we wanted to visit the Memorial, so we returned and stood in the lines with thousands of other people in freezing weather as light snow flurries fell. Once there I knew I wanted to photograph, but I didn’t want to intrude on anyone else, so I photographed things more than people in the flat, cloudy light. This photograph includes a bit of one of the pools, where water that has just fallen down the upper walls, leaving ice behind on this cold day, pauses momentarily before continuing its descent into the center void of the memorial.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: fall

Granite, Falling Water

Horsetail Fall

Winter Fog, Waterfall, and Trees

Memorial Pool

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