“Fern and Rocks” — A fern plant grows from cracks in a rock wall, Hakone Gardens.
This is another photograph from our visit to the Hakone Gardens here in the San Francisco Bay Area. We went in the early evening on spring day when the garden was open to celebrate cherry blossom season. The sun was still up when we got there, but during our visit the light transited through sunset to twilight.
The garden is packed with fascinating details, accessible by winding paths that climb and descend the property. later in the evening we climbed to one of the higher points and I stopped to photograph these ferns in fading light.
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.
A spring fern grows in the shade among boulders along the base of Yosemite Valley cliffs.
You might think that the toughest challenges on my one-day up-and-back trips to the Sierra — on one of which I made this photograph — would be getting up hours before sunrise and driving for hours, or perhaps it would be the long return drive with a midnight or later arrival. The truth? It is the midday hours. Photographically, this can be tough time of day. There are opportunities, but you have to look for them. And by late morning and early afternoon I’m simply tired from that early wake-up call… and ready for a good, long nap!
On this trip to Yosemite Valley, the pattern held. I arrived very early, photographed through the morning, following light and shadow around the Valley. At noon I grabbed a bite to eat and then… took a very long nap in my car. But the beautiful evening light was hours away on this long, late-spring day, so when I woke up I loaded my pack and set out to see what I could find in the midday light. I headed to an area along the base of the cliffs where I thought I might find some interesting rocks, trees, and soft shade light. And that’s where I photographed this sprouting fern, aglow in reflected light against a backdrop of forest litter and a boulder.
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.
Tall aspens in peak fall color growing on an Eastern Sierra hillside.
You may wonder if this stream of autumn color photographs will ever end. While this year’s aspen photographs will likely conclude soon, here in Central and Northern California there will still be other kinds of “fall” color into the new year! So don’t be surprised if this is a continuing thread right on into 2023. By then the trees will not be aspens — we will see maples, cottonwoods, and various other hardwoods from the urban environment, the nearby hills, and from California’s Central Valley.
This photograph features a grove I visit every year, thinking there’s not a lot left to do with the subject. But then, inevitably, I find a way to photograph it and it ends up as one of my subjects again the following year. This year I have a somewhat different explanation, as my third-week-of-October visit was later than usual for me. It turned out that conditions this year favored later aspen color in the Eastern Sierra. Consequently, this grove had some of the most striking color that I have seen in this spot, even though I was a good week later than usual.
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.
Soft evening light on creosote growing in windblown unes at Death Valley National Park.
Desert light (like that in quite a few other places) can go through a remarkable transformation late its the day, a transformation that mirrors the one taking place in the morning. In the middle of the day, the light is often quite intense, rather bluish (from that gigantic light panel we call the “sky), and the landscape is full of harsh contrasts between highlights and shadows. At some point in the very late afternoon, assuming a cooperative surrounding landscape and the right weather conditions, the light imperceptibly begins to soften and warm in color. If you were not attuned to this you might not notice at first, but eventually it becomes obvious as the process accelerates and intensifies, producing a sort of “crescendo of light” that often peaks just before it ends.
I made this photograph somewhere in the middle of that cycle — far enough along that the color has definitely warmed, but not so late that the full sunset redness has arrived. At this point the light changes rapidly, and features that I had not noticed suddenly become interesting. I often find myself working quite quickly at this point — perhaps in contrast to how some people imagine landscape photography works. In these situations I often like to work with zoom lenses with long focal lengths. This allows me to quickly respond to things I see at varying distances, to isolate smaller sections of the landscape, and to quickly try out different compositional ideas.
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.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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