Tag Archives: green

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

Cactus-scape

Image February 2, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Close-up view of beavertail cactus, Death Valley National Park.

Many of the photographs that I brought back from Death Valley last week feature the grand, immense scale of the landscape — which is only nature given the, well, grand, immense scale of the landscape of the place. Today I’ll take a break from those images and look share something on much smaller scale — a cactus-scape, if you will. This is a very close view of a small portion of a beavertail cactus. As I worked on landscape photography in this location I realized that these cacti were everywhere, so I soon switched to a different camera with a macro lens.

This subject may bring up the question: will this be a “super-bloom” year? I don’t have a definitive answer to that, but I’ll share a few observations. I have heard that above-average rainfall in about the November time frame supports those extraordinary spring blooms. That did not happen this year. But there was rain — quite heave and even damaging rain — much earlier in the season, and there was some additional rainfall during the December-January period. I did see some very young shoots of new plants already starting to pop up in a few promising areas. My bet? No super-bloom, but more of a good to better-than-average year for wildflowers.

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: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Fog, Trees, Meadow

Image January 13, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Foggy hills, a grove of tall trees, and a meadow above the Big Sur coast.

During a break in California’s string of atmospheric river storms I managed to make a quick trip to the upper Big Sur coast this week. It is quite a scene there right now with numerous flooded areas, downed trees, washouts, slides, and closed roadways. This also means, of course, that the usual crowds are absent, so it was a fine time to go, even if some places I like to visit were off limits. (State parks were closed, and the lower half of the route was completely shut down.)

I stopped at this location, a spot where I have photographed for years, though this time I chose to make a photograph that focuses on something other than the obvious subject at this location. (That “obvious subject” may be just barely visible if you know where to look.) Often when I photograph in this spot I try to avoid including this lovely grove of big old trees and the meadow at its base, but they became the main subject in this photograph.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Green Door, Evening

Image December 16, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A weathered green door, a green wall, a sidewalk — evening light.

First, a brief description of the photography, and then another reason that I am posting it today. I made the photograph on one of my daily walks — I try to get out and cover various routes in a radius of a couple of miles or so that add up to between 3 and 5 miles on a typical day. I always carry a camera, even though I don’t take it out on most of the walks. I’ve been past this old building quite a few times, but today I saw this door for the first time, so I stopped to photograph its worn and tilting form.

The other reason this photograph is here is that it comes from what is for me a photography tradition: the process of getting up to speed on a new camera. I usually avoid upgrading cameras too frequently. There are many reasons, but one is that I depend upon knowing a camera’s interface to the point where operation is intuitive. But eventually I do get new cameras. This was the first walk with the new Fujifilm XT5, which is going to replace the (fine) XPro2 that I’ve been using since that camera was introduced. I won’t go into the technical details at this point, but so far I’m liking the camera a lot.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

New Hampshire Leaves

Image December 6, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A patch of autumn leaves along the Kancamagus Highway, New Hampshire

While it may seem that autumn is almost over, the autumn photography season isn’t bound by the calendar. I can find subjects in the Sierra that suggest autumn to me as early as the end of August, and it isn’t unusual to find some autumn red, gold, brown, and orange colors in parts of California all the way into January. All of this is by way of explaining that I’m not done with the autumn photographs yet!

This photograph comes from our October visit to New Hampshire, where we photographed New England fall color for the first time. After years of listening to fellow photographers rhapsodize about autumn in his region, we were overdue for a visit. I made this photograph… next to a parking lot! We had stopped to make some photographs of the larger landscape, but the soft light on the leaves caught my attention. This small vignette suggests the wildly diverse colors of the autumn leaves in this region.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: green

Cactus-scape

Fog, Trees, Meadow

Green Door, Evening

New Hampshire Leaves

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