Tag Archives: intimate

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Fractured Rock

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Fractured Rock
Detail of a fractured rock wall in the John Muir Wilderness

Fractured Rock. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Detail of a fractured rock wall in the John Muir Wilderness

There are quite a few “photographer jokes” that you’ll hear if you hang out long enough with these folks. (I should make a list sometime!) Some of them come up in answer to the common question, “What did you photograph?” (A variation on, “What are you photographing?” and not totally unrelated to, “Did you get anything good?”) In a lot of cases, when asked the “what did you photograph?” question, you have choices: given a long answer (often the truest response) and make your questioner wish they hadn’t brought it up, give a very short superficial answer, or make a joke. One joke answer among some folks I know and sometimes photograph with is a cheery, “Rocks, water, and trees!”

If you have been watching recent photographs from this location in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, you may be forgiven for noting that in some cases I seem to have been reducing the subjects from “rocks, water, and trees” down to the minimal, “rocks…” This is — obviously! — one such example. It is the sort of thing that most folks would probably not see, since it wasn’t in an obvious place and is in a location where you could easily walk past while looking at other, larger things. But I wasn’t looking for the obvious, at least not only for the obvious, so I stopped here and poked around a bit, discovering a small section on a larger rock fact where the remnants of an old layer of pink rock were gradually breaking away from the underlying gray material. One more thing — when I make a photograph like this one, focusing on some compositional aspect of some small and non-iconic thing, I often think of the photographs of Mike Osborne, one of the original “First Light” photographers and a person with a unique and wonderful way of “seeing” the Sierra Nevada landscape.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Plants and Lichen, Colorful Cliff

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Plants and Lichen, Colorful Cliff
A few plants grow in cracks on a colorful cliff face in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

Plants and Lichen, Colorful Cliff. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A few plants grow in cracks on a colorful cliff face in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

I’ll be honest. I had initially walked past this spot without even noticing it, back on the first day of our trip, when we were hiking in to the location of our base camp for the next week. I was tired, feeling the effects of altitude, and just wanted to “get there.” A few days later one of my compatriots happened to mention the “wall” back at the lake we had passed on the way in, and I made a mental note to try to visit before the trip ended. In fact, it wasn’t until the last full day of our visit that I finally made it back.

The site is special in several ways, though I’d bet that quite a few hikers don’t really notice it. It rises above a section of trail along the shoreline of a lake. The rocks vary from typical Sierra granite gray to dark slate-like rock, with veins of other materials running through here and there. There are some good-sized solid sections, but much of the wall is fractured and broken. Plants grow in some of the cracks and on ledges, and lichen is attached to the rocks as well. The wall remains in deep shade until rather late into the morning, but a beautiful wash of reflected light comes across the valley from bare peaks on the opposite side. Here you can view the photograph as a record of a real place, but you can also view it as an abstract construction of color and pattern. (I tend toward the latter way of seeing it.)

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Snag and Needles

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Snag and Needles
Detail of an old snag littered with a few needles

Snag and Needles. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Detail of an old snag littered with a few needles

High in the Sierra Nevada, as you get close to the tree line, there are more and more of these old “snags” — the skeletal remnants of trees that died some time ago. In order to survive in such an environment, these trees must be very tough, and their forms given evidence of that. They often seem stunted and are twisted into remarkable shapes as they grow on and around rocks and boulders and slabs. They may survive for a long time, even as they sacrifice branches in to the elements. When they do die their wood lasts for decades. Living or dead, they sometimes seem to me to inhabit a space midway between geology and fauna, being as close to the rock as to more familiar green things.

As I have mentioned already, our location high in the eastern Sierra Nevada backcountry was in an area where the sun was blocked for hours after sunrise and for hours before sunset. In was mid-morning before any direct sunlight reached our camp and late afternoon when it left, and I could wander in the cold, soft light for hours making photographs… and freezing! I photographed this bit of an old snag in this softly shadowed blue-toned light.

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

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Water Plants

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Water Plants
Water plants growing in a wetland pond

Water Plants. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Water plants growing in a wetland pond

Reflecting water is endlessly fascinating, and it is hard to resist and opportunity to photograph it, especially when it serves to abstract the forms of other subjects. No two such photographs are ever quite alike, as the water is always in motion and the patterns of reflected light, clouds, and sky are constantly shifting.

These water plants, which you might think of as being almost objectively ugly in some conditions, become transformed by the reflections and by being positioned against the nearly featureless background of the water’s surface. Photographing this subject is, as I’ve observed among my photographer friends, both unavoidable and often a bit more difficult that you think it will be. These nearly random forms are appealing, but when you look at them closely it is easy to find compositional problems — overlaps, awkward shapes, unbalanced arrangements.

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

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Email

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