Tag Archives: highway

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Boulder, Rushing Water, Spring

May 9, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Spring snowmelt rushes over a boulder in a Sierra Nevada stream, Yosemite National Park.

I made this photograph at the very end of spring last year in the Yosemite Sierra Nevada. Last year was a year that began much differently that this year in California. While this is a drought year, the previous season was one of record precipitation, and the high country opened very late. Even when it did open – in this case the Tioga Pass Road opened on the mid-June weekend when I made this photograph – there was still a lot of snow and ice everywhere, and much of the backcountry was still largely inaccessible. This little bit of water cascading over a boulder is a scene that could have been found in any number of places, but this one was found in a seasonal stream that tumbled down a mountainside along the roadway.

Believe it or not, this is a color photograph! The colors are, obviously, very subtle, but they are there and they are, I think, important. In fact, when I was working on the image I thought about producing it as a black and white image, tried it out, and was surprised by just how different it looked when the colors were removed. There are some subtle brown/tan tones in the upper part of the boulder, and the water contains a range of subtle but important tones of blue and green.

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

Sandstone Canyon and Forest

April 26, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A winding sandstone canyon willed with trees, Zion National Park, Utah.

This photograph was definitely not shot in “golden hour” light! Although it was afternoon, the sun was still high in the sky, and that sky was a somewhat unattractive washed out light blue color. In order to not allow that quality to take over the image, I composed this scene to completely exclude sky and also to minimize the inclusion of more distant features that would show the effect of the haze. I did include a bit of it at the upper right, since that serves to give the image some amount of depth.

The area is in the “high country” of Zion National Park along the Mt. Carmel highway. This road passes to the east across and then out of the park, climbing (through an exciting but, in some ways, unfortunate tunnel in the sandstone) out of the Virgin River area of the main Zion Canyon to pass through the dome-filled, river cut highlands. I shot toward the sun here, to be able to include the beautiful shaded cliff walls, and I tried to find a composition that would show the twisting course of the creek that winds down this canyon.

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

Pines and Sandstone

April 19, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Sunlit pine trees against shaded sandstone, Zion National Park, Utah.

This was probably one of my first photographs on my recent trip to Zion National Park (and other Utah locations) in early April. After arriving in the general area of the park in the middle of the afternoon, we decided that we should see the “high country” along the Mt. Carmel Highway that heads up and east from the main Zion Canyon and Virgin River area. While almost everything in Zion is fascinating, I find this higher elevation terrain especially intriguing – with its combination of swirling and curving sandstone shapes, carved waterways, and various kinds of vegetation. At first it was hard for me to understand how I might photograph this country, but the more I looked the more I at least started to “see” it.

Of course, I like to photograph trees like these anywhere! Although when I stopped I first photographed some sandstone formations to the left of these trees, I had noticed the trees and thought about the possibility of shooting them with this backlight against the shaded sandstone cliffs, with their red tones altered a bit by the reflected blue light from the open sky.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Impossible Tree Fall, Spring

April 7, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Rushing water of a seasonal creek splashes and leaps over rocks and past a tree, Yosemite National Park.

The name of this little seasonal waterfall – found along highway 120 – is not, as far as I can tell, official. However, it seems to be fairly well-known among Yosemite folks. It is also a great name – not only because of the fun conduction of words, but also because it so aptly describes the most notable feature of the fall, the “impossible tree.” In this odd little section of rocky hillside above a road, a creek flows for a short time in the spring as the winter snow melts out. In this middle of this rocky jumble grows a single tree, with its roots seemingly attached to nothing more than rocks. So it is a doubly impossible tree, growing in the middle of a waterfall and somehow finding sustenance from granite.

This photograph was made outside of the more typical “golden hour” time, though it wasn’t all that late in the morning. My timing was just right – though luck probably had as much to do with this as did planning. As we passed by, the sun was rising high enough to peek over the top of the ridge above the fall and its light was just starting to strike the leaping water from behind and above.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: highway

Boulder, Rushing Water, Spring

Sandstone Canyon and Forest

Pines and Sandstone

Impossible Tree Fall, Spring

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