Tag Archives: high

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Snags and Mountains

July 12, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trailside snags to the east of the Great Western Divide in the Sequoia National Park backcountry

This is another of the photographs from the 2008 trip that I mentioned in an earlier post — a trans-Sierra crossing with friends via the High Sierra Trail. The route, while less known that the John Muir Trail (and shorter) crosses the Sierra from west to east, connecting the west side in Sequoia National Park with Mount Whitney and then Whitney Portal on the east side. The route provides a tremendous cross-section of the Sierra. It starts not far from middle-elevation redwood groves on the west side, follows the gigantic canyon of the Kaweah River to cross the Great Western Divide at Kaweah Gap, drops down into Big Arroyo to reach the depths of Kern Canyon, follows the Kern upstream, climbs steeply to the John Muir Trail, passes through the alpine boundary and then into alpine country to ascend Mount Whitney, and ends with the immense descent from the crest to Whitney Portal.

I made this photograph in the Big Arroyo section of the trail. We had cleared Kaweah Gap and camped in the valley below and were climbing above the Big Arroyo canyon in preparation for a short side-trip to Moraine Lake. This low ridge provided extensive views down Big Arroyo, up into the Kaweahs to our left and behind us, and across the canyon to the Great Western Divide.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Crossing Kaweah Gap

July 10, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The High Sierra Trail crosses alpine terrain near Kaweah Gap

I have been reviewing my older archives of raw files recently, partly because it simply is important to do so from time to time, and partly because I’m between locations and looking for additional images to work on. Any time I go back through the older files I find things that are interesting, and occasionally I even find some excellent photographs that I overlooked the first time around.

This photograph comes from 2008. To me it seems more interesting as a record of a particular place and a particular event than on a purely photographic basis. (I could have wished for a more interesting sky!) This was my second crossing of the High Sierra Trail, which we followed from the west side of Sequoia National Park, across the entire range, to the summit of Mount Whitney, and then down to Whitney Portal. On this trip I traveled with a group of long-time backcountry friends… unlike the first time I did this trip perhaps 25 years earlier, when I did it with my wife. I made this photograph from the top of Kaweah Gap, the pass through the Great Western Divide before dropping into Big Arroyo. The photograph looks back to the west, across the trail we had ascended to reach this point.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Meadow, Wildflowers, Granite Peaks

October 3, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A view of wildflowers leads across a meadow and lake toward High Sierra peaks

Taking a little break from the Great Basin National Park photographs today, I’m sharing another from our late August and early September backcountry time in the John Muir Wilderness. To recap, we spent essentially nine days base-camped in one spectacular location, from which we could easily explore outwards in all directions — to the meadows surrounding the lake below our camp, further down the drainage where marshy areas were lush and green, a few hundred feet higher where a spectacular meadow full of flowers provided views of alpine peaks, and further up the canyon where we could want cross-country past the timber-line. All in all, it was the kind of location and circumstances that produce a landscape photographer’s paradise.

Near the conclusion of our visit, as happens on any such trip, I was realizing that I still had not gotten to certain obvious subjects. In my case, I hadn’t really spent as much time as I should have in the area right below our camp, where these green meadows wrapped around a small, subalpine lake. So on the first two days of September I focused on exploring this nearby area a bit more. The precise spot in this photograph was one I had first walked through a week before, on the day I completed the (slow!) hike up to this lake. I had walked up this meadow on a faint trail, not really knowing where our camp was and a bit concerned about finding it. Nonetheless, the intense green of the meadow (unusual for so late in the season) and the abundant wildflowers immediately caught my attention. There were many kinds of flowers in the meadow, but here you can see the beautiful paintbrush blossoms, and then the meadow holding the little lake, a bit of forest, and in the distance the high peaks across the canyon from us.

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

Post-processing Workflow, Software, Technique

What You Get Is Not What You See

September 20, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Recently I spent more than a week photographing in a beautiful area of the Sierra Nevada backcountry. A short walk above the spot where we camped was a magical meadow — a place filled with light, grasses still green but starting to turn golden, high elevation trees scattered around the edge of the meadows, and a deep valley separating us from alpine valleys topped by steep granite peaks and ridges with scattered snow fields. At times clouds would float by and add some interest to the blue Sierra Nevada sky.

What I saw

Here is one of several photographs I made in this meadow, with the first example being a small version of a print-ready final interpretation…

Subalpine Meadow, Forest, and Peaks — At the edge of a subalpine meadow, surrounded by forest and high peaks

Here is another version of the photograph, straight out of my raw file conversion program and before I did additional work in Photoshop…

I think it reflects fairly well what I saw while I stood behind the tripod as light softened by closer clouds spread across the meadow. I’m confident that anyone who had been there with me would agree.

What the camera saw

But that is not what the camera saw. Here is what my captured file looked like before I did my raw conversion post-processing…

RAW file as exposed before conversion processing

Yuck!

This SOOC (“straight out of camera”) image looks pretty bad. The sky is OK, but the meadow is dark and flat-looking, not showing the actual quality of light at all, and the forest appears to be almost completely black.

What’s up here? Am I trying to trick you and present a false version of the scene? Am I an incompetent photographer who completely blew the exposure? Am I trying to “compensate” for a bad exposure by using radical post-processing?

The answer is “none of the above.” Continue reading What You Get Is Not What You See →

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: high

Snags and Mountains

Crossing Kaweah Gap

Meadow, Wildflowers, Granite Peaks

What You Get Is Not What You See

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