Tag Archives: fog

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Mendocino Bay, Morning

Image Leave a comment
Mendocino Bay, Morning
Waves wash onto the shoreline of Mendocino Bay on a foggy morning.

Mendocino Bay, Morning. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Waves wash onto the shoreline of Mendocino Bay on a foggy morning.

Recently I returned to the photographs from this visit to the North Coast of California, on which we spent a few days in Mendocino. This little town presents an interesting dichotomy between the old-school funky, hippiness of that part of the state and the semi-yuppified element that has grown in more recent years. In a sense, you “see it all” in this place.

On this visit we stayed in town, not more than a couple of minutes walk from the bluffs overlooking the bay just south of the peninsula on which the town sits. On this morning we wandered over there in the morning before the morning fog and haze had completely clearer, and I made a series of photographs looking inland along these bluffs to the outlet of the river that drains into the bay.

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 | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Coastal Farm, Burned Ridge

Image Leave a comment
Coastal Farm, Burned Ridge
Foggy morning at a coastal far at the base of hill burned by recent wildfires.

Coastal Farm, Burned Ridge. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Foggy morning at a coastal far at the base of hill burned by recent wildfires.

On one hand, this is a pleasant enough scene. I had headed to the California coast just north of Santa Cruz for the morning. This is one of the closest coastal locations to me, and I can be in sight o the ocean in a bit over a half hour or so. It was a typical late-spring coastal morning, with thick fog around the peaks as I drove over, and “high fog” (aka “low clouds”) all along the coast. The fog breaks up first over land, and along the this edge of the fog there is often lovely light — mixed sun and shadow, misty atmosphere, and a general soft glow. The bucolic little farm sits against the base of coastal hills, on a flat area near small lagoons.

But there’s something else in this photograph that you may have noticed if you looked closely. That far, upper ridge should be shrouded in forest trees… not the bare, skeletal remains of trees destroyed by last year’s wildfires in the Big Basin region. As a Californian, I’m used to the late-summer and early-autumn wildfire season. In the past decade or so, however, it has become worse and more widespread as the combination of unusual heat and drought have stressed the landscape. This past fire season all kinds of places burned where don’t usually expect to see such huge fires, including locations like this one where the charred forests extend to within sight of the ocean, and in a few cases all the way to it.

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 | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question.

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

Photographs: Birds, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Crane Congregation

Image Leave a comment
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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question.

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

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

The Sea

Image 2 Comments
The Sea
The soft color and light of fog, sky, and ocean along the Pacific Coast.

The Sea. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The soft color and light of fog, sky, and ocean along the Pacific Coast.

Well, this is slightly embarrassing. Actually, it would not be — if I just kept the story to myself. (And, indeed, I am keeping part of the story a secret. Feel free to wonder.) Just a few days ago I read about and saw some photographic work that was seemingly defined by its intentional out-of-focus quality. And not in what I regarded as a good way. My response to the work was that it looked like photographs that would have been quite mundane — bordering on snapshots — if they had been in focus. But because they were not, they ended up in a gallery. And now I present… a very out of focus photograph.

So, what to make of this? That’s actually up to you, but to the extent that a photograph is about things or expresses something, well one way to think of it is that by removing some of the familiar details of the subject you are free to think about larger aspects of it that might be less apparent if you were distracted by the “small stuff.” I’m also working with some ideas about color and luminosity here. That’s all I’ll say for now…

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 | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

Scroll down to leave a comment or question.

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