Tag Archives: foliage

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Dogwood Flowers, Rain

May 31, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late spring rain on dogwood flowers, Portland, Oregon

We made a brief visit to Portland, Oregon over the Memorial Day holiday, and – surprise! – it rained! This was actually a welcome development for those of us who live in parched California, where we are in the second year of drought conditions. We spent most of our Portland time in the downtown area, predominantly between the main downtown and the Pearl district – where there are lots of interesting things to see, good food to eat… and, of course, Powell’s books. On the final morning we ventured out a bit further to an area of north Portland where we visited the beautiful St. Johns Bridge over the Willamette River. We wandered down below the span and its gothic-looking support towers, where we found lots of vegetation including some very lush dogwood blooms.

There is also a bit of a technical story behind this photograph. I usually shoot with a full frame Canon system, using a variety of lenses and mostly working from the tripod. But that is a lot of gear to carry on a trip like this one that was not primarily about photography. (Though, to some extent, virtually all of my travels are at least partially about photography!) So I left behind the full-on system and instead carried my Fujifilm X-E1 Digital Camera, along with the Fujifilm 35mm f/1.4 XF R Lens and the Fujifilm XF 14mm f/2.8 R Ultra Wide-Angle Lens. The camera is a mirrorless “rangefinder style” body that brings to mind the classic rangefinder film cameras. This makes for a very small and light package – and this photograph was made handheld using the 35mm prime. While my main goals with this camera are more likely to involve street or travel photography, I’m quite pleased with how it performed in this nature shot.

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

Lupine, Sierra Nevada

May 7, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A thick patch of spring lupine flowers high in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range, California.

We had time for only a one-day trip to Yosemite, timed to coincide with the peak of the dogwood bloom season in the Valley. We left very early – way before dawn – with a plan of arriving in the Valley not too long after the sun came up. (This time of year, arriving by dawn in the Valley would require a 2:00 a.m. start time – and, in some ways, the Valley itself isn’t so much a dawn photography subject.) After we entered the park on highway 120 I started looking for some dogwood trees that often blossom a bit later – since the light was good here it would make more sense to stop and shoot that to keep driving to arrive further on when the light wasn’t as good.

We saw a couple of trees thick with flowers, and quickly turned around to drive back to them. We spent some time photographing these trees and then moved on. (Unlike in a typical year, there was no snow at the junction with the still-closed Tioga Pass Road, and areas that would usually be full of run-off water seemed largely dry.) The area, burned twice in recent years, along the road as it descends toward the Valley is often a good place to find wildflowers. I wasn’t expecting too much in this drought year, and for the most part I was right – but at a turn-off we suddenly came upon a very large patch of beautiful lupines and stopped to photograph. I’m crazy about shooting into the light, so I got down low and photographed these flowers with the light coming from almost directly behind.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Gambel Oak Leaves, Autumn

April 3, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Brilliantly colored autumn colors of Gambel Oak leaves, Capitol Reef National Park

This is a very different view of the autumn gambel oak leaves than another that I recently posted. That other photograph showed the perhaps more typical brown or tan phase of fall oak leaf color. This one, on the other hand, shows a particularly colorful specimen of these leaves, caught at perhaps just the right moment and in the right light in a canyon of Capitol Reef National Park early one late-October morning.

The angle from which you view these leaves matters a lot, as it often does with autumn leaves in general. The nature of the ambient light also makes a big difference. And did I mention the timing!? If you can get a bit of back-light behind the oak leaves, what might otherwise be a bit dull can begin to glow. And the soft, diffused lighting in this deep canyon setting allowed the light to fill in the shadows. These particular specimens possess very interesting color and shape patterns: there is an interior still-green section on many of the leaves that is just beginning to edge towards yellow-gold, and it is surrounded by brilliantly red and orange leaf edges. When I shoot in deep shade – and these plants were deep in the shade of this small canyon – I often find that the photograph seems unnaturally blue, given that most of the light is either direct or reflected blue sky. In most cases, in order to get a color balance that reflects what the eye saw – and our visual system compensates for the blue saturation – I have to alter the color balance a bit and move it away from this artificial-seeming blueness. However, in this case, if I adjusted far enough to neutralize the blue that you can still see on the more-or-less gray branches and twigs, the color of the leaves would probably defy belief!

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Slot Canyon Walls

March 26, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The sculpted walls of a narrow and curving slot canyon, Zion National Park

On the first non-travel day of my most recent Utah visit, since we were passing through Zion National Park on our way to points beyond, we decided to spend the better part of the day shooting there. For a few reasons, including that it was a bit early for fall color there, we chose to not go to Zion Canyon, but to instead spend the time along the Mount Carmel Highway that cuts through the park from west to east. Our object was to photograph the wide range of interesting subjects found there: sandstone of all shapes, textures, and colors; trees, both evergreen and those with fall foliage, and more.

We ended up spending most of the day along this route. An observer might have wondered a bit about us. We would drive slowly along the road in one direction, frequently slowing down and pulling over, looking around a bit, then either getting back on the road or piling out and heading off in various directions – either up into rocks or down into a wash or canyon. Eventually we worked our way to one end of the road’s passage through the park… and we turned around and headed back. We did this loop several times. Why? First, things that you might miss while driving one direction become easier to see when you head the other way. Second, and perhaps most important, light is not a static thing. It changes in may ways – intensity, color, angle, direction, what it strikes and what it misses – as the day goes on, so while the <i>landscape</i> might have been, arguably, “the same,” the <i>lightscape</i> was in constant flux. I made this photograph in a short section of slot canyon, contriving to find a point of view from which almost nothing but the twisting and overlapping forms of the rocks would be visible, along with just a bit of foliage.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: foliage

Dogwood Flowers, Rain

Lupine, Sierra Nevada

Gambel Oak Leaves, Autumn

Slot Canyon Walls

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