Tag Archives: hills

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Nature

Desert Mountains

April 7, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Desert mountains rise above Death Valley in evening light

This view takes me back to something I believe I understood the very first time I saw Death Valley. It was close to twenty years ago, and I had gone there as an adult with a group of middle school and high school kids who were planning a long hike in the park. (The event did not come off quite as planned, but that is a long story that I’ll have to tell some other time.) We arrived at the park boundaries after dark and made camp at the first possible place, a small and mostly unimproved campsite right off the road between the pass we had come over and the valley itself. In the dark I could tell little about the place: it was warm, the wind was blowing, I didn’t see much in the way of plant life. We climbed into tents and sleeping bags for the night.

Early the next morning I crawled out and got my first view of Death Valley. There’s nothing quite like suddenly coming upon your first view of such an iconic place. I recall the specific view even today, looking down across massive alluvial fans, across the valley itself, and at these rugged and bare hills and mountains on the far side so many miles away. This photograph, made from a different location this spring, includes a small section of the scene I looked at back then. It also illustrates one of my strongest impressions of Death Valley — it is a place where the geology is laid bare with virtually no forests or water to obstruct the land itself, even more so than above timberline where there are still lakes and where snow may linger all year. It is also a place, perhaps to our surprise, in which one of the largest factors shaping the landscape has been… water!

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

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Tree, Winter Light

January 16, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A bare winter tree and clearing tule fog.

On Sunday there was ground fog all over the San Francisco Bay Area, and I had a few free hours, so I headed out to see what I could find. I went to a place that is very familiar to me, a local haunt where I have hiked and photographed for decades. I had not been there in perhaps a year, so it was good to reestablish my relationship with the location and note a few changes. The little trip also reminded me that it isn’t necessary to travel long distances to find photographic subjects — quite often a closer look at nearby places will reveal worthy subjects.

The idea here was to arrive before the fog cleared, photograph in the thick fog for a while, and then be ready to photograph the brief transition period as it thinned, a time when brilliant and stunning but ephemeral light may appear. During my short drive to this location the fog remained thick, but just before reaching my destination it began to clear, likely because ground fog doesn’t stick around as long in the hills. As I parked and loaded up a light load (my lightweight trail photography setup) there were still some pockets of fog clinging to the hillsides, but in most places there was instead a sort of haze that glowed when I photographed in the direction of the sun. I’m very fond of this kind of light, so I quickly looked for subjects that I could use to advantage, and I soon found this tree standing on a grassy hillside and silhouetted against the glowing atmosphere beyond.

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

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Desert Hills, Evening Shadows

November 29, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light and shadows on desert hills and Death Valley salt flats

My first visit to the park was in the late 1990s, but I’ve been a regular since then. I visit Death Valley for about a week at least once each year, and have photographed all over the park. In a way, this first surprised me a bit, since when I was younger I was not attracted to the desert at all, having been brought up on the notion of the “desert wasteland,” and having been a huge fan of the high Sierra since I was young. So even though the desert was nearby I didn’t visit before a chance encounter that came about when I was one of the adult chaperones on a trip introducing high school and middle school kids to the place. Literally from my first view of the place (after crawling out of a tent in a high place at dawn to look across the valley), I was entranced.

The photographic subjects in this national park (and similar desert locations) range from intimate to immense, and several things always draw my attention. Because of the hot and dry environment, the landscape is laid bare in ways that are uncommon in other mountains. (Unless you go above tree line, into another of my favorite worlds.) The land-forming effects of uplift, mountain-building, water (!) and wind are easy to see. And this naked landscape is often painted and colored by the light in beautiful ways. This photograph, at least as I see it, offers several contrasts: between the low hills and the flatness of their surroundings, between the shadow and light, and between the small and the large.

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

Bluff, Tidal Flats, Tomales Bay

October 20, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening along the shoreline of Tomales Bay

This is another photograph from our very recent visit to areas of California just north of San Francisco. If you follow the news, that description perhaps calls to mind the recent (and current, as I write this) major wildfires burning in California, including the disastrous fire in the Santa Rosa area that killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes and other structures. In fact, we were very close to that area on this trip. We might not have gone at all, except that one of the reasons for going there was to participate in a wedding — and since the wedding went on despite the first, we went. We had planned a few days after that for photography, and we decided to stick to that plan, too.

The effects of the fires were obvious in many ways: signs in shops and elsewhere about people needing a place to stay or raising funds for fire relief, the traffic heading to the coast to try to find relief from the smoke, and the constant presence of that smoke in the air. We ended up doing much less photography than we usually would, but on one day we did manage to make a few photographs. We had driven north up that coast a ways, turning around just north of Jenner where the smoke became quite severe, and we were returning to the area around Point Reyes National Seashore. We arrived alongside upper Tomales Bay, which separates Point Reyes from the rest of California, not long before sunset. Here the smoke thinned a bit, mostly just producing some atmospheric haze, and the scene was quiet and still in the early evening light.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: hills

Desert Mountains

Tree, Winter Light

Desert Hills, Evening Shadows

Bluff, Tidal Flats, Tomales Bay

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