Tag Archives: foliage

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

October 28, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn foliage on a steep, rocky eastern Sierra Nevada slope

This is a bit of a complicated photograph, and I’ll try to make some sense out of it below. The back story is that I was in the eastern Sierra doing some fall color photography, and early on this Saturday morning I had gone to a fairly popular location for photography. It is a place that I’ve photographed many times, going all the way back to a few years ago just before the huge popularity of digital cameras began to bring sometimes-overwhelming numbers of photographers to the area. I was quite sure that there would be large groups there on this morning, including photography workshop participants lined up along the shoreline of the nearby lake, but I also knew that there would be plenty of other things for me to photograph without joining the crowd.

I began by making some photographs of small things — little vignettes of a few aspen leaves, some rocks and boulders, light shining through branches holding colorful leaves. As I did this I saw that the far side of the canyon was going to remain in shadow after the sun began to wash things out elsewhere, so I decided to use a long lens and photograph trees and rocks in that location from a distance. Most of the photographs feature more obvious subjects such as an individual grove of colorful trees, but in this one I decided to just go with the complexity of the scene, which includes broken rocks, brush, and a few small aspen trees.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Bare Trees, Wall of Leaves

October 17, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A row of bare aspen trees stands in front of a grove of colorful aspens

This photograph was almost an afterthought at the end of an evening of shooting up high in an east-side Sierra canyon where many of the trees had lost their leaves, and the rest were at the brilliantly colorful phase that comes right before the leaves fall. When I came up the canyon I took a little gravel side road that passes through another grove of small but interesting trees before heading on up to the end of the road “just because it was there.” This is not an obvious photographic spot, since the trees are not large and because it can be difficult to find the right backgrounds.

There is something special about soft, evening light on fall foliage, and especially on aspens. It can produce a very intense quality of color, and the soft light shines into shadows and lowers contrast. As I moved slowly up this small roadway I could see that there was a band of quite colorful trees along the banks for the creek, and that between me and this color there was a thinner line of trees that had already lost their leaves. This let the stark trunks and branches of these trees stand out against the wall of color from the trees that still hadn’t lost their leaves.

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

Plants, Canyon Wall

June 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Plants grow from thin cracks in the rock wall of a desert canyon, Death Valley National Park

I found this little scene in a well-known Death Valley Canyon, where the walls become vertical, hundreds of feet high, and quite close together. Canyons like this are some strange combination of beautiful — with soft light, colorful rock, shade — and harsh — with the clear evidence of flooding that periodically sweeps through and rearranges everything, against a backdrop of more typical aridity, and a terrain almost entirely consisting of rock.

In these places I am always intrigued by where and how plant life manages to survive. This is nowhere more true than in such canyons in Death Valley National Park, where the usual challenges are made worse by extreme heat and dryness. Here two kinds of plants have managed to find a foothold, but in must be a very tenuous one. The grow from thin cracks in solid rock, a good distance above whatever water comes during the periodic flooding of the wash, in an environment in which the light is most often muted yet in which extreme temperatures are common for much of the year.

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Old and New Ferns

April 24, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

New ferns grow against a backdrop of last year’s dead ferns

These ferns are an easily visible part of the annual cycle of growth and decay in the redwood forest. At the right time of the year they can produce very lush green growth in some areas, but later on in the season they die back and they are instead dry and brown. Each spring, after rain and as the days get longer, the cycle starts again and the new green shoots appear against the backdrop of the old, dead plants.

This is such a spot, and the main frond is, indeed, this year’s new growth. The shriveled plants underneath, hanging straight down the bit of hillside, are the brown plants left from the previous year. I initially was thinking of a color photograph when I made the exposure, looking at the obvious contrasts between the new and old and especially between the green and brown colors. But somehow, as I looked at it in post, the color rendition wasn’t working and it started to feel like monochrome might be more interesting. (Yes, sometimes I do not know which way I’ll go with a photograph at the time of exposure, and the post-processing phase ends up being as much a time of discovery as the time when I make the initial exposure.)

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: foliage

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

Bare Trees, Wall of Leaves

Plants, Canyon Wall

Old and New Ferns

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.