Tag Archives: flow

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

Wash and Alluvial Fan

Image February 7, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on a giant alluvial fan at the base of a desert mountain wash.

The immense scale of the Death Valley landscape is one of its most impressive characteristics. I’ve written that it reminds me of places like The Yukon, where features stretch on over great distances, so large that it can be hard to make sense of them. One day I decided to go to a location at one extreme edge of the park. Starting roughly in the middle of the park, the trip took me close to two hours of driving, the last portion on a gravel road. I also contemplated visiting another location at the opposite end of the park — it would have been close to a 100 mile drive in the opposite direction, with more than 40 of it on gravel. Driving direct between these two points might have taken six hours and covered close to 150 miles. From many high places in this park you can look across many tens of miles, often so far that the landscape may simply disappear in the distant haze.

It isn’t just the travel distances that are huge — many of the features of the landscape are so large that they defy an accurate sense of scale. The gravel fan in this photograph, spilling out of a narrow canyon at the base of one of the parks large mountain ranges, is likely about ten miles from my camera position and probably at least 1000 feet above the valley floor. It would take a full day to walk there, with no trail to follow. I made the photograph as the first direct sunlight had worked its way down the face of the mountain range.

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

Boulder and Cascade

Image May 7, 2021 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

No landscape photographer I know is quite able to completely resist the lure of photographing moving water cascading over rocks. I can imagine quite a few reasons for this. The miniature landscapes in Sierra creeks like this one hold an infinity of potential compositions. Unlike so much of the landscape, the water is in constant motion, to the point that one almost needs to make many exposures to get it just right. There are interesting technical questions to resolve, including just how much blur is the right amount.

Beyond all of that photographic stuff, these streams are just fun places to spend some time. Many years ago I still took fishing gear into the backcountry. I stopped once I realized that I didn’t need the excuse of fishing in order to justify time spend wandering up and down these creeks, with their attractions of wildflowers, green plants, and the constant sound of moving water.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.

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

Spring Flow

Image January 23, 2021 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

For a place made of stone, the Sierra Nevada can be a surprising transitory subject. Summer is brief, and wildflowers bloom and are soon gone. Color comes to aspens in the fall and is gone weeks later. Spring is the time of rushing water in the Sierra, from the high country to the lowlands. The water rises as the snow melts, creeks and rivers fill to their banks, and waterfalls appear. I photographed this minor torrent along the Merced River as it passes through Yosemite Valley.

Every landscape photographer I know has tried his or her hand at photographing the moving water this way. No matter what other marvelous landscape features are around, eventually we come back to the water and try to do something with the ever-changing colors and shapes of water. This is that “what the camera sees” sorts of photography, since our eyes cannot see the river this way, and these shapes and colors change too quickly without the camera to grab and hold them.

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

Aspen Cascade

Image October 20, 2020 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn aspen trees spill down a small valley in the Eastern Sierran Nevada.

There is no escaping the fact that this is an iconic Eastern Sierra fall color subject. Heck, even Apple used it for one of their operating systems! It was a bit of a surprise to me that I ended up here on this year’s abbreviated fall color expedition. I had initially planned to photograph much farther north and perhaps even to the east of the Sierra. However, those plans were derailed after I crossed the Sierra crest via Sonora Pass and dropped into the worst wildfire smoke I think I have experienced. I headed south, thinking it might get clearer as I drove, but it actually got worse. Coming into Lee Vining I could barely make out the near shoreline of Mono Lake in the noxious murk. So I decided that I would just continue south until the air improved.

It wasn’t until Bishop, California that it became tolerable, though it was smoky even there. So I headed into the the Sierra from there and ended up in the drainage in which this is one of the three major forks. I mostly photographed other things, and even when I went here the first time I spent most of my time of photographs of individual aspen leaves. When I returned to my camp after sunset a huge and thick cloud of wildfire smoke descended. I almost packed up and left, but I decided I would see what it looked like in the morning. It was still smoky when I woke up, though some light was getting through, so I chose the sure bet and went to this place. This curving grove of aspens winding its way down a shallow gully to the shore of a lake is a remarkable thing, with quite a lot of color variation from top to bottom.