Tag Archives: green

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

Eastern Sierra Stream, Autumn

Image October 14, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This photograph is of one of those little places — you could easily pass right by it and miss it. I have, and I’ve even stopped nearby and not seen a photograph. This time I was heading up a canyon in cloudy conditions and light rain, and perhaps the unusual conditions helped me to see differently. In any case, as I drove past the area I noticed the red plants growing close to the ground, even though there were largely obscured by intervening trees.

I quickly turned around and came back, parked, and then spent some time poking around and looking. I finally ended up down along the bank of the stream, the closest I could get to the red plants, and I found a composition looking upstream toward more colorful plants and the white trunks of an aspen grove.

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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: Abstract, Photographs: Nature

Leaf

Image September 18, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A single leaf against a shadowed background

I photographed this remarkable leaf inside the conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden. The plants were phenomenal, but the conditions were not! It was terribly hot. The humidity was high, even for August in New York. And the light was limited… and I was shooting handheld. But the remarkable plant displays were too interesting to pass up, so I spent a bit of time photographing.

In these surroundings most of the photographs were, of necessity, close-ups, focusing on a few leaves or flowers and trying to exclude the background. (This was inside a building, and including the other visitors or the steel construction wasn’t what I had in mind.) Here the solitary curving green leaf was set off against a background of deep purple-brown leaves.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Wildflowers, Morning

July 16, 2018 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Wildflowers grow along a creek draining past the trail around Saddlebag Lake

I have hiked around this lake, located just east of the Sierra crest near Tioga Pass, a number of times in the pass. My first visit to the area was quite a few years ago, when a friend and I did a short mid-October pack trip to access a basin full of small lakes beyond. We ended up here because it was past the October 15 cutoff for overnight parking along Tioga Pass Road, and our reward was a beautiful late-season trip that featured snow flurries as we began hiking and through the night, and beautiful post-front light the following day.

This time the adventure was much more tame. I arose before dawn and got there in time to start hiking at about sunrise. I had the shoreline trail entirely to myself as I walked to the far end of the lake, where I planned to explore a bit and photograph some lakes and ridges. Partway through the hike a small creek drained across the trail on its way down to the lake, and here the moisture supported a colorful crop of lush plants and wildflowers, many at the peak of their blooming cycle. I stopped, set up camera and tripod, and photographed them with a bit of the lake’s surface reflecting the blue sky and the summit North Peak.

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Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Redwood National & State Parks

Redwood Forest Understory

June 19, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Smaller plants grow on the forest floor beneath the canopy of North Coast redwoods

This has become a bit of a repeating theme here recently, but this is another photograph of the dense vegetation of Northern California redwood forests — this scene is in Del Norte State Park, part of the Redwood National And State Parks system that I visited earlier this month. During my visit I was looking for rhododendrons — I found some, but it turned out that I was probably just a bit early. This trail is known for the flowers and they were there, just not in great numbers quite yet.

Sections of this trail traverse a ridge, but on either side the forest grows in coastal canyons. Here, especially early and late in the day, the light is soft and muted a lot of the time — often the ideal conditions for photographing this subject. The trees are varied, including both massive old-growth specimens and some younger trees fighting their way upwards for a bit of sun. The understory is lush, with ferns, bushes, rhododendron plants, and much more.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: green

Eastern Sierra Stream, Autumn

Leaf

Wildflowers, Morning

Redwood Forest Understory

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