Tag Archives: green

Photographs: Nature

Green and Yellow Tulip

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Green and Yellow Tulip
“Green and Yellow Tulip” — A yellow tulip begins to open, wiht some of its green bud color intact.

Yes, another tulip! I made a lot of tulip photographs on our early-spring visit to the garden of a historic estate on the San Francisco Peninsula. I won’t share all of them, but I will continue to gradually release a set that includes different colors, settings, and states of development.

As I have previously mentioned, I particularly enjoy the appearance of the buds before they fully blossom, and I rarely photograph them once they are mature flowers. This one takes me about as close to that final stage as I can go and still claim that it is (sort of) a bud. This specimen is right on the edge of blooming fully, and we can almost see it opening up. A bit of the bud’s green color is retained, but the yellow of the flower predominates.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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Photographs: Nature

Tulip Bud and Leaves

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Tulip Bud and Leaves
“Tulip Bud and Leaves” — A spring tulip bud, just before blossoming.

This photograph is the result of something I rarely do — post the same photograph in monochrome and color versions. I shared a color version recently, but while I was working on the image in post I took a little detours and experiment with a black and white interpretation. I like both of them, though they do create different effects.

Black and white almost always has a more abstract quality to me. We know that the world is not monochromatic, so we begin to accept a wider range of interpretations as soon as we move to black and white. There’s less of the “it isn’t real!” concern with monochrome. (Not everyone realizes it, but monochrome images have historically often been the subject of extensive post-processing.) Here I think that the monochromatic version lets us focus more on the shapes and tones themselves, with less need to relate the image to something real.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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(All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.)

Photographs: Nature

Tulip Bud and Leaves

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Tulip Bud and Leaves
“Tulip Bud and Leaves” — A spring tulip bud, just before blossoming.

While a field of wildly colorful tulips is impressive and hard to resist, I like photographing individual flowers, usually before they are fully bloomed. I love the transition from the early green buds, though the first tentative appearance of the flower’s color, to the moment when the blossom begins to open.

This one is at the state where its eventual color is just starting to appear, taking over from the green early-bud stage. At the upper tip, especially, there is a bit of yellow and a tiny spot of pink. By the way, with this photograph I’m going to do something a little unusual for me: before long I will share a monochrome interpretation of the same image.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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

Tall Autumn Aspens

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Tall Autumn Aspens
“Tall Autumn Aspens” — A tall grove of aspens with bright autumn colors, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

This grove showed an interesting pattern — most of the color in the frame comes from short trees along the edge of a clearing, while the white trunks of older and taller trees extend on up toward the top of the frame. Straight trees like these are the exception in much of the Sierra, and we often see shorter aspen trees that are twisted and bent. I suspect that the extra light from the nearby clearing is one reason that these trees grew taller.

Once again, this is a photograph made in the soft light. I came into this canyon late in the afternoon, and soon the shadows from very tall ridges in the west moved across the landscape. The soft light allows the details in darker areas to emerge a bit, and that nearby clearing diffused a bit more reflected light into the scene.

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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