Tag Archives: highway

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

Davenport Bluffs, Sunset

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Davenport Bluffs, Sunset
Davenport Bluffs, Sunset

Davenport Bluffs, Sunset. Near Davenport, California. December 8, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last light shines on coastal bluffs and Davenport, California

On this early December day I had gone off to try to join a G+ “photowalk” that was purportedly taking place that day. I was looking forward to going to a few favorite local photography locations and to meeting some people who I’ve only known online. But it was not to be! I ended up being delayed at home and couldn’t leave in time to meet the group at their first location, Henry Cowell Park. I went with Plan B and figured I would try to join up with them at lunch in Davenport. I got there and didn’t see anyone, so I figured that I was early and I drove up the coast a bit. I came back to Davenport and thought they might be in one of the two restaurants, so I picked one and went in for lunch… by myself. (I found out later that, yes, they were in the other restaurant a hundred yards south.) After lunch I went across the road to the parking area when I thought folks might meet up, but still no luck – though I did see a few photographers out on the nearby bluff. I headed out there and finally ran into a couple of people from the group… which had gone down to a nearby beach area to shoot.

Finding interesting stuff up here on the bluff, I decide to work the location I found myself in rather than heading off and looking for something else. While the location was interesting, the light was initially unpromising. However, I thought there was a chance that things might improve later so I walked around and began doing some shooting. At one point, I talked to some other photographers about the somewhat bland lighting conditions and pointed out that it seemed to me that there was at least a chance that we might get a bit of interesting light as the sun dropped to the horizon, when the light can sometimes shine in below the clouds and produce some brief but beautiful conditions. This prediction turned out to be right, and I made this photograph just as the show was beginning, and warm-tone light was starting to hit the bluffs, beaches, and water.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Zion High Country, Evening

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Zion High Country, Evening - High country of Zion National Park in evening light
High country of Zion National Park in evening light

Zion High Country, Evening. Zion National Park, Utah. October 14, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

High country of Zion National Park in evening light

As an official member of the I Love Backlit Trees club, I’m more or less unable to resist shooting straight toward the sun near the start of end of the day to capture the light illuminating the fringes of trees from behind. Yes, it is a repeating subject of mine… The high country of Zion National Park along the Mount Carmel Highway is a great place to find such light if you are observant and think about where and when to look. Especially late in the day – but not quite all the way to sunset – the light slants across ridges and hills and picks off the trees, which here are separated enough to allow the light to catch whole trees. (This is a bit harder to find among the denser forests of my Sierra Nevada.)

This sort of shooting provides some challenges. One, of course, is the potential for a very wide dynamic range between the brightly lit leaves and needles of the trees and the shaded areas that may be behind and around them. Although the camera’s metering system may not show it, the sunlit portions of the trees are often extremely bright and can easily blow out completely – and the solution is to expose less… which diminishes the light in the shadows. Several solutions are possible. Here I made a single exposure with the brightest areas just at the limit of exposure, and if I had opened up more or lengthened the exposure the fringes of the trees would likely have gone all the way to pure white. (You can allow this to happen with a few specular highlights without much of a problem, but don’t over-do it!) With the single-exposure approach, I find that the shadow fader in ACR is my friend! It does a fine job of bringing back a bit of the detail in the darker areas that might otherwise be lost. Although I didn’t employ them in this photograph, there are some other approaches that can also work. One is to use exposure bracketing – making two or more images at different exposures, usually one for the shadows and one for the highlights, which are then manually combined in post by means of layer masks. This is labor intensive but can produce very wonderful results.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Red Rock and Trees, Afternoon Light

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Red Rock and Trees, Afternoon Light - Back-lit trees in low afternoon sun light grow on rocky sandstone high country, Zion National Park
Back-lit trees in low afternoon sun light grow on rocky sandstone high country, Zion National Park

Red Rock and Trees, Afternoon Light. Zion National Park. October 22, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Back-lit trees in low afternoon sun light grow on rocky sandstone high country, Zion National Park

As much as I have come to love Zion Canyon itself, with its monumental cliffs, winding Virgin River, and cottonwood trees, something still draws me more strongly to the high country such as that found along the Mount Carmel Highway. (I’m sure that the “real” backcountry will eventually appeal to me just as much, but my “getting acquainted” process with Zion is still in its relatively early phase.) This higher elevation terrain, which can at first perhaps seem somewhat overly complex and even “disorganized – if that makes sense – has come to hold more interest for me photographically, though it has been a bit more difficult to figure out how and when and where to photograph it. I was intrigued by these wonderfully complex sandstone patterns of curves and lines when I first saw them, but initially had a hard time seeing coherent photographs among them.

Since my first visit – less than a year ago, believe it or not – I have now had the opportunity to revisit this area on quite a few days, and I feel like I’m starting to “get” its rhythms. Initially it was a matter of passing along the roadway through the park and catching glimpses of juxtapositions of features, bits of light or color, and various canyons and prominences and thinking “there must be a way to photograph that.” Return visits, in various types of light, during two seasons, and at all hours of the day have helped me figure it out. Among my favorite subjects here (and elsewhere!) are backlit trees, here combined with some low ridges and the swooping curves and textures of the wonderful red rock.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.

Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Backlit Trees and Sandstone, Afternoon

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Backlit Trees and Sandstone, Afternoon - Afternoon sun back-lights trees and brush in the sandstone high country of Zion National Park, Utah
Afternoon sun back-lights trees and brush in the sandstone high country of Zion National Park, Utah

Backlit Trees and Sandstone, Afternoon. Zion National Park, Utah. October 22, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Afternoon sun back-lights trees and brush in the sandstone high country of Zion Naitonal Park, Utah

I love this “sea of sandstone” country from the higher elevations of Zion National Park, especially early or late in the day when the low angle sun catches the tips of the needles and leaves of the trees and bushes. The rock formations have a combination of sculpted large features and rough and angular small features that I like as well.

Several times this year I had the opportunity to spend good portions of days along the Mount Carmel Highway through the park. Between the well-known tunnel and the east border of the park, the surroundings are filled with this sort of landscape: small canyons, deeply worn stream beds, knobs of stratified red sandstone, and trees and plants managing to grow anywhere they can get a bit of soil on this rocky terrain. As I travel this road it seems that juxtapositions of these components are constantly forming, sometimes so quickly that I don’t have time to stop. However, because I have been over this road quite a few times now, I’m beginning to understand a bit more where and when to look. The idea here was to line up a couple of almost parallel hill structures, each topped by backlit trees, against the backdrop of shadowed and stratified rock.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.