Tag Archives: fall

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Color

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Aspen Color
Colorful autumn aspen trees in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

Aspen Color. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Colorful autumn aspen trees in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

On the surface, at least, this is a very simple photograph… so it gets a simple title: Aspen Color. The trees are part of a large (and both popular and accessible) grove in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Like so many others, I stop here each autumn, and I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the trees rising from a creek to far up the surrounding slopes, almost committing to memory the general scene and many of its details. While many Sierra Nevada aspen trees tend to be short and somewhat twisted, at least by comparison to those familiar groves to Colorado trees standing straight and tall, in places in the Sierra you can find those big, stout, and tall trees. This grove is one of those places, though there are plenty of the smaller trees mixed in, too.

On the day I made this photograph the colors in the larger grove varied from deep green to extremely bright yellow/gold, with a few bits of red-orange visible here and there. The latter colors first caught my attention in the spot shown in the photograph. The reddish color was subtle and only in a small area, but it was the starting point for the idea of the photograph. It is hard to make some sort of order out of such complex detail, but the idea was to place a complete tree along the left side of the frame, put that bit of red-orange at lower right, and to include some of the leaves that had not yet lost their green tint.

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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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Quiet Lake, Autumn Reflections

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Quiet Lake, Autumn Reflections
Autumn aspen trees reflected in the quiet surface of an Eastern Sierra Nevada lake

Quiet Lake, Autumn Reflections. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn aspen trees reflected in the quiet surface of an Eastern Sierra Nevada lake

Although this photograph does not show the “classic” view of this location, there may be enough here to make it look familiar. (If you know… shhhhh.) I stopped here at an “off-hour” that wasn’t the time of day when most people looking for to reproduce that classic photograph show up. That wasn’t my intention, and I now typically only go to this place (and others like it) when I suspect that something truly unusual might happen for the most part.

I arrived and wandered over to the often-crowded spot… to find that I was almost alone here. What an unusual pleasure! The water was extremely still for this time of day, and cloud-filtered light was coming from behind and to the left of the bright grove of aspen trees. They reflected beautifully in the lake, but I decided to interrupt that reflection and its symmetry by finding a way to include the grasses growing along the near shore of the lake, grasses that were themselves starting to take on the colors of autumn.

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: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Multi-colored Aspen Trees

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Multi-colored Aspen Trees
Multi-colored autumn aspen trees along the Eastern Sierra Nevada

Multi-colored Aspen Trees. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Multi-colored autumn aspen trees along the Eastern Sierra Nevada

We are now well past the fall color in the Eastern Sierra Nevada — and in many other locations for that matter — but I’m still working my way through this year’s photographs of the annual transition. One of the ironies of sharing photographs like this is that I don’t have new photographs when people are most attentive to things like fall color… shortly before the event occurs. As it is in progress I’m in the field making new photographs. And it isn’t until after our attention has moved on to other things that I’m able to share the work.

I made this photograph on an overcast late afternoon in the margin between high desert sagebrush country and the start of alpine country. Many beautiful aspens inhabit this zone, though not everywhere. In the right conditions the open terrain allows for clearer views of the trees than you might find among the conifer forests, and sometimes these trees can grow straight and quite tall. It is hard to say what “peak color” means, as at the point that one set of trees has maximum color, other nearby groves may range from green to nearly bare trunks. This might be peak color from that perspective, as all of those phases of the color transition are visible here. The soft, overcast light produces a less stark appearance since the gentle light fills in the shadows and doesn’t overwhelm the color highlights.

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: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Hillside Aspen Color

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Hillside Aspen Color
A grove of colorful autumn aspen trees on a hillside shared with brush and conifers

Hillside Aspen Color. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A grove of colorful autumn aspen trees on a hillside shared with brush and conifers

This little grove of slender aspens is high on a rocky hillside. It is a grove that I know pretty well, having watched it for many seasons while photographing more accessible aspens nearby. I’ve been attracted to its position, high on the southern slopes of this valley, in a position to catch early sun coming over the higher ridge top. Usually, by the time the other nearby trees that are my primary target are in full color, these trees have dropped many of their leaves. But this season seemed slightly unusual in one way — in such places it has been common to find isolated groups of still-colorful trees that usually drop leaves by this time.

Making this photograph required the use of a type of lens that not every landscape photographer considers using, namely a rather long telephoto — this particular lens is a 100-400mm zoom, which provides quite a narrow angle-of-view on a full frame camera. There are lots of things that often appeal to me about using longer focal lengths for landscape photography, but in this case it was a pretty practical matter: the trees were at a great distance and there was no realistic way to move closer!

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 | Twitter | Facebook |
Email

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