Tag Archives: foliage

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Desert Mallow Blossoms

Image April 28, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Orange desert mallow blossoms, Death Valley National Park.

These orange desert mallows are among my favorite desert flowers. It seems to me that they are often somewhat unobtrusive, but the will suddenly burst forth with a bush-full of bright orange color. The blooms are lovely, and they remind me a bit of small California golden poppies.

Although I sometimes don’t recall exactly where I photographed such things, my recollection in this case is that I photographed them in a quiet desert canyon starting at the top of a large alluvial fan, where we had gone to eat lunch the first day we arrived in Death Valley on our early April visit. After hours of driving (actually a couple of days of traveling!) it was good to stop and sit in a quiet place. As we ate we looked around the canyon a bit and started to pick out likely photographic subjects, though there was no hurry to get to work. Eventually we wandered over toward the edge of the canyon where some interesting-looking plants were growing, among them a mallow bush.

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.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature

Autumn Foliage, Wetlands

Image December 30, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn foliage and a reflecting pond under late Autumn skies

Fall color varies a great deal from location to location. My East Coast friends remind me that I haven’t seen anything quite like the forest-wide flood of color that happens there every fall — and they are probably right. (I still need to go to New England and photograph fall color. Too many subjects, too little time! ;-) On the other hand, we West Coast dwellers have a few special opportunities of our own, at least if we have learned where to look for them. One of these opportunities comes from the extraordinarily long color season.

I usually see my first indications of “fall” color in the Sierra as early as late-August. The first hints are subtle, but by halfway into September they are becoming pretty obvious, with the first aspens changing colors, and by early October the show in the Eastern Sierra is quite amazing. Because of the elevation range and north/south extent of the Sierra, the color lasts a long time — higher and more northerly color may come first, while lower elevation color may still be appearing over a month later. Once the aspens are done, the cottonwoods and other lower-elevation trees come into form. At the western Sierra foothill elevations the color can peak close to the beginning of November, and out in the Great Valley and closer to the coast there can still be excellent color in December! That’s when I photographed this group of trees, reflected in a pond and underneath autumn clouds… and at the peak of their seasonal color transformation.

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Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Nature

Leaf

Image September 18, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A single leaf against a shadowed background

I photographed this remarkable leaf inside the conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden. The plants were phenomenal, but the conditions were not! It was terribly hot. The humidity was high, even for August in New York. And the light was limited… and I was shooting handheld. But the remarkable plant displays were too interesting to pass up, so I spent a bit of time photographing.

In these surroundings most of the photographs were, of necessity, close-ups, focusing on a few leaves or flowers and trying to exclude the background. (This was inside a building, and including the other visitors or the steel construction wasn’t what I had in mind.) Here the solitary curving green leaf was set off against a background of deep purple-brown leaves.

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

Spring Trees

July 5, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A rather well-known grove of Yosemite Valley trees, with new spring foliage and photographed from the “wrong” side

Near the end of this spring’s Yosemite Renaissance artist-in-residency in The Valley the early signs of spring were appearing — grass was turning green, rivers and waterfalls were flowing, temperatures were rising, and leaves were appearing on the deciduous trees. I photographed this well-known little grove just a few days after the first spring leaves emerged, when they still had that transitory yellow-green color of early spring.

Almost anyone familiar with Yosemite Valley will know immediately where this grove is located. This photograph was not made from the typical direction — and you may be able to spot the reason it isn’t photographed as often if you just look closely. A careful scan of the scene reveals the presence of a roadway! That is often a complete show-stopper for photographs like this one, but I liked the backlit tree against that darker forest enough to give it a try in this case.