Tag Archives: field

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

Flooded Field, Winter

August 24, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The stubble of last year’s crop in a flooded San Joaquin Valley winter field

This photograph comes from a season that seems quite remote today, during the warm late-summer days of mid-August. I made the photograph back on New Year’s Day 2014, when a group of us met in the San Joaquin Valley to welcome the dawn (literally — we arrived before sunrise) of the new year by spending a day photographic migratory birds and the flat and moody Central Valley landscape. Looking at photographs like this one now always reminds me of how quick and how regular the annual cycle is, since we are now considerably closer to New Year’s Day 2015 than the first day of 2014.

This photograph could also be a reminder to the stresses to wildlife from a third drought year and the conversion of the overwhelming majority of the important Central Valley wetlands to farm land. On the positive side, this location is an example of how agriculture and wildlife protection can coexist, since it is farmed in the dry season and then flooded for the birds in the winter. And does it ever attract birds! Here the patterns left by farm machinery are visible in the waters of the shallow ponds where birds were floating on this day.

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

Forest, Talus, Winter Fog

March 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter fog floats across forest and talus fields, Yosemite Valley

I’ll take a cold and foggy winter morning in Yosemite over a blue sky summer day anytime! On this morning I was up reasonably early, though unsure of what I might be able to photograph. The light down in the Valley was tending toward flat and gray, so I thought that it might make sense to go to Tunnel View and hope for some early morning sun that might illuminate the various layers of clouds and mist from behind. That never happened, so I turned my attention instead to the fog down in the Valley.

It is common at this time of year for fog to form in the Valley after precipitation, and it had rained all of the previous day and was threatening to on this morning, too. When the fog starts to form, almost anything can happen. There might only be thin, wispy bits of fog below, or large clouds of fog may form and drift back and forth and up and down the Valley, lowering so that tree tops are visible or rising to cover the upper slopes of peaks and cliffs. On this morning there seemed to be thicker fog far up the Valley, but in the middle section and just below us the fog was thin enough that as it drifted across the forest some trees almost always remained visible. Photographing this was a matter of using a very long lens and then watching closely as the conditions evolved. For a while it might seem like nothing photographically special would happen, and then some combination of fingers of fog moving through trees, a bit of clearing somewhere, a sudden but silent movement of the clouds would happen, and suddenly a composition would appear out of nowhere and often just a suddenly disappear. Here the fog was drifting up into the talus slopes near the base of El Capitan.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Snag and Talus Field

February 4, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An old snag stands atop a rocky outcropping and in front of a huge talus field, Kings Canyon National Park

During our mid-September 9-day expedition into the Sierra Nevada high country of Kings Canyon National Park we spent the better part of a week camped in this 11,000′ basin full of lakes and trees and rocks. We camped near the outlet stream of a lake located in a narrow section of the valley, with many more lakes beyond our location and a string of them ascending the valley to our south. Each day, from early morning until after dark, was largely spent exploring this landscape and making photographs.

The valley of lakes to our south, of which our lake was the lowest, was plainly visible to us from our camp site, which was situated on a rise above this lowest lake. From here we could look up the canyon across “our lake” and see a string of several other lakes along this creek. A few were easy to see while others further up the valley revealed themselves primarily by surrounding rock and by breaks in the vegetation. Every day, no matter what else we were doing and where else we photographed, we did at least some work around these closest lakes, and I developed a sort of “daily rounds” taking me up one side of the valley to the upper lake and then back down the other, with occasional detours across the middle of the valley. Is I recall, I was making one of those detours when I photographed this tree, located on top of a small rocky knoll in the middle of the upper valley and backed by the tremendous talus field descending from the surrounding ridges high above.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Austria

Hohenwerfen Castle

September 10, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Hohenwerfen Castle stands on a hill above Werfen, Austria, in the Salzach Valley with the alps as a backdrop.

This castle has an almost “fairytale” appearance, standing alone atop a tall hill in the middle of the Salzach river valley with tall mountains rising on almost all sides. It is not far from Salzburg, Austria. From what I have read, the actual story might be a bit more prosaic, and there is even a hint that the castle may be associated with some grim and somewhat awful stuff in its role as a place where various people were imprisoned.

We had come here to visit the popular Eisreisenwelt Ice Caves, high up in the mountains above the castle and the valley. The castle is an obvious central point of interest in the valley, but perhaps because we had been so high up in the mountains I had not really thought to photograph it. However, as we came back down on the road from Eisriesenwelt to the valley, we came to a hairpin turn closer to the valley where we suddenly had an unobstructed view of the castle with the town behind and successive mountain valleys rising beyond. Although it looks clear in the photo, it was raining lightly from a passing thunderstorm and this made the light a bit more dramatic.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: field

Flooded Field, Winter

Snag and Talus Field

Hohenwerfen Castle

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