Tag Archives: flower

Beneath the Blooming Dogwood

Beneath the Blooming Dogwood
Looking upwards toward dense spring dogwood flowers.

Beneath the Blooming Dogwood. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

Looking up toward dense spring dogwood flowers.

Continuing with the spring dogwood theme, for this photograph and its sibling that I shared earlier, I came at the tree from a somewhat different perspective. Typically we photograph this subject so that we can view the flowers without a lot of interference. But here I placed myself where I could aim upwards and shoot through foliage.

Photographing this way fills the frame with light, and instead of the more typical top light,here the light glows down and through the leaves and flowers. On top of that the more distant canopy and flowers become soft and luminous as their focus fades.


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.

Blog | About | Twitter | Flickr | FacebookEmail

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question. (Click this post’s title first if you are viewing on the home page.)


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

Columbine Flower #2

Columbine Flower #2
A columbine flower, photographed in soft light at a San Francisco Bay Area garden.

Columbine Flower #2. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

A columbine flower, photographed in soft light at a San Francisco Bay Area garden.

As I wrote recently, my initial acquaintance with Columbine flowers came high in the Sierra, where a white specimen grows in rocky, alpine terrain. To me, those flowers defined the concept of “Columbine,” and it did not really cross my mind for a long time that there might be others.

I may be slow, but eventually I figure things out. Visits to more civilized gardens eventually taught me that there are other varieties of this beautiful flower. We found several on a recent visit to a garden here in the San Francisco Bay Area one evening. I decided to let much of this flower be soft and out of focus, only putting some of the yellow center in sharper relief.


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.

Blog | About | Twitter | Flickr | FacebookEmail

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question. (Click this post’s title first if you are viewing on the home page.)


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

Beneath the Blooming Dogwood

Beneath the Blooming Dogwood
Light glows through the blossoms and leaves of a spring dogwood tree.

Beneath the Blooming Dogwood. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

Looking upwards toward dense spring dogwood flowers.

Over a month ago I shared a photograph of a blooming dogwood tree in Manhattan’s Central Park. In that post I alluded to the fact that this was not likely to be quite my typical year for photographing this kind of tree. Typically I would make a spring visit to Yosemite Valley and other nearby areas to photograph this annual event, but it looked like I wouldn’t this time. But surprises arrive, and a few weeks later I did find myself in Yosemite with camera next to flowering dogwoods. But the surprises weren’t over, and later I photographed these blossoms in a San Francisco Bay Area location.

There’s a beautiful public garden on the San Francisco Peninsula where we go regularly to photograph. We started much earlier this season, and we had seen dogwood trees there — though I didn’t photograph them much. We went back much later, at the end of spring, and we were surprised to find new dogwood blooms in this place where we had thought they were spent.


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.

Blog | About | Twitter | Flickr | FacebookEmail

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question. (Click this post’s title first if you are viewing on the home page.)


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

Columbine Flower

Columbine Flower
A columbine flower, photographed in soft light at a San Francisco Bay Area garden.

Columbine Flower. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

A columbine flower, photographed in soft light at a San Francisco Bay Area garden.

In another recent post featuring a Columbine flower (in that case a purple and white version) I mentioned my first awareness of this type of flower. It came decades ago on Sierra backpack trips when I saw a version of the flower up high in alpine country. The incongruity of a delicate white flower in such a place formed my ideas about it. That cemented my (not entirely correct) notion that thee columbine is an alpine flower and that it is always white.

The flower in this photograph is white, but I found it at a distinctly non-alpine location in the San Francisco Bay Area — a large public garden on the San Francisco Peninsula. We had gone there for a summer event featuring drinks and food al fresco in this setting of grasslands and woods, but we did bring our cameras and planned on spending some time photographing the spring flowers.


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.

Blog | About | Twitter | Flickr | FacebookEmail

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question. (Click this post’s title first if you are viewing on the home page.)


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