Tag Archives: first

Photographs: Birds, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Crane Congregation

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Crane Congregation
Sandhill cranes in a wetland pond as the first morning light arrives on a foggy morning.

Crane Congregation. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Sandhill cranes in a wetland pond as the first morning light arrives on a foggy morning.

Things have changed a lot since I made this photograph back in early March, barely more than two months ago. At that time a trip to the Central Valley to photograph birds typically involved being completely self-contained, avoiding any unnecessary stops en route, and bringing along a mask and hand cleaner. Two months later and it is quite possible to envision time when things are back to pretty much normal.

Back when I made this trip I worked my way quickly through the images I brought back, but soon had to move on to other projects. Now I am finally finding the time to revisit this collection of many hundreds of raw files (that’s what I end up with when I photograph birds!) and take a closer look at them. I made this photograph very early on this slightly foggy morning, when the first eastern light was struggling to make it though the haze. The cranes were mostly standing quietly in shallow water as the sun arrived, though the tension of their incipient fly-out was already on my mind.

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.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Peninsula Trees, Morning

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Peninsula Trees, Morning
Trees on a rocky peninsula catch the first morning sun at a Yosemite National Park backcountry lake.

Peninsula Trees, Morning. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Trees on a rocky peninsula catch the first morning sun at a Yosemite National Park backcountry lake.

There’s nothing like have the time for a slow morning wandering the perimeter of a forest-lined Yosemite backcountry lake. We camped at this one for something like four nights back in 2014, when a group of us spent a week in the high country making photographs. Each morning, well before sunrise, it was down to the shoreline wander and photograph.

I love photographs of trees in back-light, but there are some challenges. The obvious one, of course, is that you are pretty much guaranteed to be shooting almost directly into the sun. But second challenge is that the scene between camera position and subject is often in the bright sunlight, even if the background is pleasantly shaded. Photographing on a lake can help with this issue since the water helpfully reflects that shaded background and is hardly affected at all by the direct light, aside from a bit of extra illumination of anything that happens to be floating on the water.

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.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Lake and Peaks, Dawn

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Lake and Peaks, Dawn
The first light touches high peaks above an eastern Sierra Nevada lake, John Muir Wilderness.

Lake and Peaks, Dawn. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The first light touches high peaks above an eastern Sierra Nevada lake, John Muir Wilderness.

There is an earlier photograph of this scene that is very similar to this one, so similar in composition that you might have to see them side-by-side in order to recognize the differences. Due to exposure challenges (deeply shadowed foreground and brightly lit peaks) I made a series of exposures. Recently, while working on a project, I went through the group of images again and decided that this one had some promise, too. I think I’ve decided that I like this one better now!

Our group was camped for a week at this location, a place almost completely surrounded by high, rocky terrain that extended all the way to the Sierra crest. It is a lovely place, full of varied subjects. In fact, I made this photograph less than a minute’s walk from my tent! It almost seems like cheating when I can roll out of my sleeping bag in the morning, crawl out of the tent, walk a 100 feet and start photographing.

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.

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Photographs: Mono Lake Basin

Tufa Field, Dawn

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Tufa Field, Dawn
First dawn light on a field of short tufa formations.

Tufa Field, Dawn. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

First dawn light on a field of short tufa formations.

One of the great privileges about photographing landscapes is that I get to wake up way before dawn so that I can be in place before the sun rises. No, really. Like many of you, I used to dread the idea of getting up in the dark, and I could not fathom how anyone could actually want to do this. But even though I’ll admit that the sound of an alarm at, say, 3:30AM is not something I look forward to, at least I now understand that there are rewards that make it worthwhile. Such as standing alone in an immense, silent space as the first light creeps over mountains to the east.

Tufa, from I’ve come to understand, comes in quite a variety of shapes and sizes. There some well-known tufa structures that have been photographed lots of times not far from here, and I’ve photographed those, too. I have gotten to know some absolutely huge tufa formations in desert areas around Death Valley. (If you were familiar with only the first one I mentioned above, you might not even recognize the second as an example of the same thing.)These very small tufa structures embody yet another form of this stuff.

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 | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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