Tag Archives: four

Photographs: Birds, Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Four Cranes in Flight

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Four Cranes in Flight
Four lesser sandhill cranes in flight against blue sky.

Four Cranes in Flight. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Four lesser sandhill cranes in flight against blue sky.

So often photography is about composition, controlling the relationships among elements within the frame —left and right, front and back, up and down, relationships among colors and luminosity levels, lines, curves, and all the rest. This is certainly the case when photographing from the tripod, and it is usually true even when shooting with a handheld camera. Even in situations when things happen quickly, we try to maintain some awareness of how the different elements fit together.

Then some birds fly overhead against a pure blue sky… and one just makes exposures. In the midst of photographing birds in the larger landscape, I realized that I was in a spot that groups of sandhill cranes were traversing, often nearly directly overhead. To some extent you take what you get in these situations, and you don’t have any control over the relative positions of the birds. But you do have some control, at least if you have been photographing birds for a while. Rather than just blasting away in burst mode — which is sometimes the only realistic strategy — you can watch the birds, track their movements relative to one another, and increase the odds a bit by timing the exposures.

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.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening

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Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening
The last light of an autumn day falls across a group of trees in Owens Valley with the Sierra Nevada in the background.

Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last light of an autumn day falls across a group of trees in Owens Valley with the Sierra Nevada in the background.

Landscape photography often feels a bit like hunting to me. I may go to a particular location with a general sense that something worthwhile is likely to happen there — and that sense is often based on some combination of long-developed intuition and knowledge of the antecedent conditions and the current situation. But I often do not have a specific subject or composition in mind. (Sometimes I do, but that is less likely.) In other words, I believe that there is a good chance that I’ll find the sort of thing that appeals to me photographically… so I go to a place at a time because I think the odds are good I’ll find something interesting.

One result is that I have to be ready to discover, change plans, improvise, and respond quickly to whatever I discover. (It also means that there are occasional dead-ends, but I digress…) We went to this spot with something entirely different in mind, but within minutes of arriving I decided that the “something else” was not going to work… and I saw that the line of sunlight coming across Owens Valley was striking this group of trees and that I only had a moment or two to photograph before the light left them. I made an initial exposure in landscape mode, then switched to portrait mode when I noticed more light on the foreground than the background. In the end, I came away with two rather different photographs of these trees — in the landscape version they lie near the bottom of the frame with only more distance subjects above them, while here they are situated beyond the stretch of foreground plants and the distant peaks occupy less of the frame.

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.

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Four Trees, Owens Valley And The Sierra

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Four Trees, Owens Valley And The Sierra
Four Owens Valley trees in evening light, against the shadowed backdrop of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

Four Trees, Owens Valley And The Sierra. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Four Owens Valley trees in evening light, against the shadowed backdrop of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

Our recent travels ultimately took us to Utah, but we began with an obligatory visit to the Eastern Sierra Nevada. It doesn’t really seem like autumn until I have renewed my acquaintance with the autumnal transformation of the aspen trees. I had been up there a week earlier, so this was a shorter visit, but it gave us enough time to do a bit of exploring, visiting some spots that we don’t typically visit.

On our final evening before continuing to the east we decided to do a bit of wandering in Owen’s Valley, and our random ride eventually brought us to this spot just as the last sunlight was coming over the Sierra crest and angling across the Valley. We had headed out this direction for an almost entirely unrelated reason, but once there this row of four trees distracted us, and we quickly worked the light before it was gone. (This was one of those landscape-photography-as-action-photography moments — that shadow line was approaching quickly as I made my exposures, and before long the trees were no longer in the sun.) From this vantage point the immensity and abruptness of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra is clear — the wall of peaks, here embellished with a trace of autumn snow, towers above Owens Valley.

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.

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

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Photographs: Birds, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Quartet of Geese

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Quartet of Geese
Four closely-spaced Ross’s geese in flight above the California Central Valley.

Quartet of Geese. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Four closely-spaced Ross’s geese in flight above the California Central Valley.

This is a somewhat straightforward photograph of a small group of Ross’s geese in flight over California’s Central Valley. I made the photograph on a cold January morning back in 2013… which is the sort of thing you might find me doing on January mornings in just about any year.

I often try for some kind of landscape context with these bird photographs, or perhaps some unusual light or color or atmosphere. But this photograph is pretty straightforward — just four geese against the winter sky. One thing I like about it has to do with the positions of the four birds. You can press the shutter a whole lot of times as geese fly by before you get a photograph where four of the birds stand out this clearly and are this visible.

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.

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