Tag Archives: field

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

Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness

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Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness
Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness

Alpenglow Clouds, Mount Conness. Yosemite National Park, California. June 18, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Clouds lit by alpenglow drift across the face of Mount Conness beyond the Tenaya Creek drainage, Yosemite National Park.

Earlier this week I posted another photograph of the same evening. This one was shot a bit earlier (believe it or not!) than the other photograph, as the intense and perhaps unexpected color display was just getting started. I’ll have more to write about the phenomenon in a future blog post that uses this evening as an example, but it almost seem like the sunset progressed backwards (oxymoron alert!) as it went on. It had begun with very boring and low contrast light, somewhat flattened by a haze that took on an increasingly ghastly blue-green hue as the light began to fade. Although the surroundings were spectacular on this opening day of Tioga Pass Road, the light and atmospheric conditions seemed to be conspiring to show them it their worst (literal and figurative) light.

But just at dusk a hint of pink appeared in some of the clouds ringing Mount Conness, the tall peak in the upper left. At first it was so faint that only those of us who were looking for it might have noticed, and we perhaps thought that we were simply trying to convince ourselves that something was going to happen. But the color increased, and as the more distant areas picked up better light, they shone through the foreground haze more clearly, and this haze faded in the same way that a scrim does in a theater when the front lights dim and the stage lights rise.

I find that this type of scene provides some of the most difficult technical and judgment challenges. So often the goal in an image, especially if it is going to be a print, is to try to get as much light into the scene as possible. A lot of the work in post-processing, at least for me, is done with the goal of trying to fill the image with light by means of various careful adjustments, often involving the use of masked curve layers. But here, the coloration depends upon not being overly bright – too much light either decreases the intensity of the pink and purple shadings or else sends them off into the land of the grotesque and gaudy. And the light in shadows – and there are a lot of shaded areas in this scene! – is very blue, much more so than the untrained eye would imagine when looking at the scene in person. This requires another set of tricky and subjective judgments – it would not look right to leave portions of the scene as blue “as they really were,” nor would it look right if the blue were diminished too much. But how much is right? There is no objective answer that I know of, so the goal (for example, on the large granite face of Polly Dome at the left) is to come up with a balance that seems blue enough but not too blue. A similar issue arises in these dark areas when it comes to deciding how bright is bright enough. Believe it or not, virtually nothing in this image is actually black, with the possible exception of a few very tiny areas in the lower left. The luminosity of the very dark areas had to be lifted a bit… but how much is just right? Again, a matter of personal judgment about which there is no objectively right answer.

All of that technical stuff aside, this evening provided one of the most glorious, albeit brief, displays of sublime light I have seen in the Sierra.

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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.

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

Alpenglow, Mammoth Peak

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Alpenglow, Mammoth Peak
Alpenglow, Mammoth Peak

Alpenglow, Mammoth Peak. Yosemite National Park, California. July 22, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Alpenglow lights the face of Mammoth Peak beyond a small tarn near the summit of Tioga Pass, Yosemite National Park.

This was very close to the last exposure I made on this productive late-July day last year. After photographing for a few hours in the vicinity of Tioga Pass, I ended up right at the pass as the day came to an end. Braving hordes of mosquitos – comes with the territory! – I worked the area around the pass itself, building compositions out of juxtapositions of the water in the small meltwater ponds, shoreline meadow and boulders, grasses growing along the edge of the water, the surrounding pine forests, and the more distant peaks of Kuna Crest. In this photograph, what is very nearly the very last direct light of the day is bathing the slopes of Mammoth Peak, which still had a fair amount of snow on its flanks even in late July.

This scene posed a few technical challenges. First, there is obviously a great distance between the foreground granite boulder and the very distance mountain. I wanted the foreground to be in optimal sharpness, so I used a relatively small aperture to maintain sufficient sharpness on the far ridge. There was also a fairly large dynamic range in the scene, ranging from soft but direct light on the snow fields of the peak to the dark areas within the forest on the other side of the pond. I wasn’t certain that I’d be able to handle the full dynamic range in one exposure, so I made three – one longer exposure to get a bit more light from the shadows and another shorter one on the dark side to avoid blowing out the brighter areas of the sky. In post, I discovered that there was enough detail in the shadows that I could get everything I needed from a single exposure, though I had to do some work with curves to get create an image the conforms more closely to the way I saw the scene at the time.

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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.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Devils Cornfield, Morning

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Devils Cornfield, Morning
Devils Cornfield, Morning

Devils Cornfield, Morning. Death Valley National Park, California. March 31, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Low angle morning light silhouettes receding hills and plants near Devils Cornfield, Death Valley National Park.

Taking advantage of the low angle light from the sun as it rose above the Funeral Mountains, I shot almost directly into the light with a long lens to photograph these backlit plants (“arrowweed” I believe) growing along the fringes of the Devils Cornfield area not far from Stovepipe Wells. Although the compressed perspective from the relatively long focal length disguises the fact, I was shooting from a hill that gave me some elevation above the flat surface of the Valley here, and provided a bit better view of the tops of the hills receding into the haze.

I made a variation on this photograph at the same time that I posted earlier – it is in color and used an even longer focal length to get a bit more detail of the mesquite tree that is barely visible in the upper right area of this shot. The color image has a much less start appearance than the black and white rendition with its contrast between the light on the tops of the plants and the surrounding dark soil.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Email
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

Central Valley Sky, Winter

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Central Valley Sky, Winter
Central Valley Sky, Winter

Central Valley Sky, Winter. Great Central Valley, California. January 23, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Thin winter clouds drift above farmland, Central Valley, California.

Photographing these beautiful winter clouds above the California Central Valley near the Cosumnes River between Stockton and Sacramento involved a certain amount of luck. For the most part it had been an extremely foggy morning – so foggy that at a few points early in the day I simply couldn’t find anything to shoot. Eventually the light began to filter down through the tule fog and I had some good luck shooting further up the valley at the Cosumnes River Wildlife Preserve.

At a certain point as the fog begins to thin it goes through a phase that is not so photographically compelling. The very thick fog can be quite interesting, and the light can be very special just as the sun starts to force its way through the fog as it starts to clear. But they there is a period when it is sort of sunny and sort of foggy, and but perhaps lacks the best aspects of each of the two conditions. That is how it was at about the time I left the Preserve and started back down the valley on my drive home.

Much earlier in the morning I had visited this side road near a bend in the Cosumnes River, so I decided to try it again since it was only slightly out of my way on the return drive. I drove slowly all the way to the end of the side road – to where it runs into the levee at the river – and then turned around to start back. I saw lots and lots of waterfowl, including impressive sandhill cranes and beautiful white egrets, but they were all too far from the road or in areas that didn’t provide the right kind of background. Near these flooded fields I stopped to consider trying to photograph some of the birds, changed my mind, and instead decided to see what I could do with these buildings, the flooded fields, and the sky. It was my luck that this final stop coincided with the near clearing of the fog and the appearance overhead of these wonderful clouds.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Email
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.