An imaginary landscape derived from subjects photographed in Death Valley National Park.
“Imaginary Landscapes” are images most often derived from photographs of natural scenes and objects, but modified in ways that are not intended to be realistic.
While working on this photograph, I was experimenting with some techniques for post processing images, particularly to control the visibility of features at the very light and very dark ends of the luminosity scale. One thing led to the next, and soon I had darkened the sky, enhanced the dynamic range in the clouds, and tried a monochrome interpretation of the scene. Then I got the idea to play around a bit with the sky and clouds and before long things had progressed to a point that was well beyond believable.
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
A subtle abstraction of motion-blurred snow geese in the sky over Skagit Valley, Washington.
In the second half of February I had the opportunity to spend four days in the Pacific Northwest, in and around the Seattle area. It seemed that there were two wildlife events taking place – both involving birds. The one that was getting the most attention was the snowy owls up in, if I understood correctly, the Vancouver, BC area. For a variety of reasons that subject was not going to be on my itinerary for this trip. The other was the trumpeter swans and snow geese that were settling in the lower Skagit Valley, roughly between Conley and Laconner. I did manage to spend the better part of an entire day there photographing these birds, along with a few others including bald eagles.
I arrived in the area very early, at just about the time of what would have been sunrise had it not been raining lightly. As I drove out of Conley I began to see the trumpeter swans here and there on the bright green winter fields. But despite some serious wandering about on rural side roads, I was not able to get close enough to them to make photographs. So I moved on, soon coming to a closed produce market alongside the road near fields and just before the road crossed the nearby river on a bridge through the woods. Here, at a curve in the road, I spotted many thousands of snow geese just across a drainage ditch and not far from the roadway. I pulled over and set up and watched as even more birds began to arrive, until the largest flock of geese that I have even seen was assembled in this empty field. Then, for some reason I could not discern, the entire group of thousands and thousands of geese spontaneously and en masse rose up into the air. Fortunately, I had been thinking about this possibility and an idea I had to photograph them with a long lens and at slow shutter speeds, and I was already at the right shutter speed and had the long lens on the camera. It was mostly a matter of aiming straight into the thickest part of the flock and trying to keep some eye on the background patterns as the geese rose into the air. I took this photograph from the set since it was almost entirely filled with geese and used it as a starting point to do a bit of additional post-processing to produce the interpretation of the photograph that you see here.
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
An imaginary landscape from surf, rocks and horizon at Point Lobos State Reserve, California.
I refer to photographs like this one as “imaginary landscapes” – though I suppose that this one is actually an imaginary seascape. The boundary between these photographs and my Regular Old Garden Variety Landscapes is a bit nebulous, but it relates to how far and how intentionally the interpretation of the scene departs from what might be regarded as its objective reality. In this case, some things were done at the time of exposure and some other things were done in post that make this image more obviously a subjective interpretation of the scene than might be the case with many of my other photographs. But you could see that by looking at it, right?
In any case, this is a single photographic “capture” made with a long exposure time that was extended by the use of a nine-stop neutral density filter – and this is what creates the majority of the soft quality of the image. Some additional work was done in post to further manipulate the original image – work with saturation and certain ways of diffusing portions of the image and so forth. In the end, little of that matters beyond the fact that these techniques were ways of producing the image that I had in mind, and which I intend to evoke something about the nature of the real scene upon which it is based.
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
An imaginary landscape photographed in San Francisco.
It has been a while since I’ve posted an “imaginary landscape” photograph – so here goes. This is a single exposure, everything that appears in the frame was there when I made the exposure. Some significant post processing was done to this image, but it was not constructed in post.
Beyond that, I’ll leave it to your imagination to think about what is going on here.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
