Tag Archives: frozen

Winter Reflections, Central Park

Lake edge with ice and reflections.
“Winter Reflections, Central Park” — Trees reflected in a strip of water at the edge of a frozen lake, Central Park.

I photographed this little scene on a cold morning walk through New York’s Central Park this past December. We were fortunate to have light snow one morning, and that changed the appearance of the city and the park. It had already been cold enough to freeze most of The Lake’s surface, but the light snowfall covered imperfections. In this spot fallen leaves rested on new ice and the reflected the silhouettes of nearby trees.

The concepts of “nature” (and even of “wilderness”) are complex and, I think, not entirely fixed. Sometimes we accept the notion that these things mean “devoid of evidence of humans.” But there’s a problem with that idea — it suggests that humans are independent of the natural world. Finding the natural world in places like this — even if you can perhaps hear car horns in the distance — is a reminder that nature is everywhere and we are a part of 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” from Heyday Books, is available directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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21 Choices

21 Choices
A Pasadena street corner on a winter afternoon

21 Choices. Pasadena, California. January 6, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A Pasadena street corner on a winter afternoon

To some extent, although I’ll write a bit about it, this is one of those photographs that you’ll need to sort out for yourself. It may seem like a snapshot, or it may seem like something else, or it might seem like both.

Just after New Years Day we went to Southern California for a few days, driving down the Coast Highway (before the winter storms closed it) and then visiting areas at the northern and southern ends of the Los Angeles Basin. We stayed in Pasadena, a place I hadn’t visited for a while and one that I don’t know all that well, aside from the typical Californian’s knowledge of a place that comes from driving past on freeways. Because we had some unscheduled time we ended up wandering in downtown Pasadena a bit, and I had time to begin to get a bit of a feeling for the place, at least as it is in mid-winter light of the sort in this photograph.


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

Memorial Pool

Memorial Pool
Memorial Pool

Memorial Pool. New York City. December 26, 2013. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Memorial  pool at the National September 11 Memorial, New York City.

It is hard to know precisely what or how to write about this place as it evokes so many responses of all different sorts. On that September day over a decade ago we were on the opposite coast, watching the events unfold as if in a dream. A year and a half earlier we had stood on top of these buildings at night. Since then my oldest son has moved to New York and now works within a very short distance of this place. Our first visit to the site was a few years ago, when almost all original traces of the September 11 events were gone (though if you looked closely you could see chips and cracks in places), and it had become an incredibly busy construction site, with more cranes than I had ever seen in one place and with the new tower climbing skyward. It was hard to connect what we saw on that visit to what had occurred – until we walked around a corner and saw a memorial to firefighters from the closest fire station.

This time we first walked here on Christmas morning. We didn’t pick that day for any particular reason except that we were not far away and it seemed like a place that we wanted to visit. We walked down, looked up at the new tower through trees, and walked back. The next day we wanted to visit the Memorial, so we returned and stood in the lines with thousands of other people in freezing weather as light snow flurries fell. Once there I knew I wanted to photograph, but I didn’t want to intrude on anyone else, so I photographed things more than people in the flat, cloudy light. This photograph includes a bit of one of the pools, where water that has just fallen down the upper walls, leaving ice behind on this cold day, pauses momentarily before continuing its descent into the center void of the memorial.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Pine Cones and Ice, Reflected Sky

Pine Cones and Ice, Reflected Sky - Pine cones on morning ice, blue with reflected light from the sky, Yosemite National Park.
Pine cones on morning ice, blue with reflected light from the sky, Yosemite National Park.

Pine Cones and Ice, Reflected Sky. Yosemite National Park, California. June 19, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pine cones on morning ice, blue with reflected light from the sky, Yosemite National Park.

I’m on a bit of a minor Yosemite run right now, as I’ve found a bit of extra time to get back to my review of the past ten year’s of image files. I had almost completed the task earlier this year, but the work stalled out a few months back somewhere in the spring of 2011. I’m now up to June of that year and hoping to continue the slog!

I made this photograph right about the time that Tioga Pass first opened for the season – not the first day, but very close to it. I had gotten up very early that morning to photograph in the pre-dawn cold near Tioga Pass, and from there began to work my way back to the west towards Tuolumne Meadows. I stopped at a small roadside lake to photograph a larger scene and as I was setting up for that shot I looked down and noticed the newly formed ice with its fractured texture reflecting the morning’s blue sky and supporting a variety of things that had blown down including a couple of pine cones. If you look carefully you can just make out rocks and grasses beneath the ice.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | FacebookGoogle+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.