Tag Archives: islands

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Night

Mono Moonrise

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Mono Moonrise
Autumn full moon rises over Mono Lake, California.

Mono Moonrise. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn full moon rises over Mono Lake, California.

The scene is an autumn moonrise over Mono Lake, a scene that I often encounter on my fall photographic visits to the Eastern Sierra. I’m there often enough that it seems like I have this opportunity almost every year. I had been photographing more typical autumn subjects earlier in the day — largely the fall colors of aspen trees — but I decided to finish that activity early enough to get myself to a likely location to see and photograph the moonrise over the lake. These days, with the help of various digital tools, we can come very close to putting ourselves in precisely the right spot at precisely the right time. On this evening the moon rose in early twilight, but I continued photographing until it became quite dark.

On a technical note, there are some challenges to including the full moon in a photograph made after dark. The biggest issue is that the moon is a lot brighter than the landscape — the landscape is in darkness but it is essentially noon on the moon! There are ways to deal with this, one of which is to photograph before the landscape becomes completely dark, and I did that here. But I was pushing that boundary a bit, and I was initially unable to get the balance between the moon and the dark landscape that I was looking for. However, as sometimes happens, the sophistication of post-processing software advanced, most notably with the introduction of some powerful new selection tools in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW. (Despite the popularity of Lightroom, I’m still a Bridge/ACR/Photoshop user.) These tools enabled me to make some important adjustments to the dark portions of this image while retaining detail in the moon. (NOTE: This is a re-working of a photograph that I had previously shared back in 2019.)

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Islands, Wilderness Lake

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Islands, Wilderness Lake
Rocky islands with trees at a small wilderness lake in the Yosemite backcountry.

Islands, Wilderness Lake. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Rocky islands with trees at a small wilderness lake in the Yosemite backcountry.

This photograph is almost a companion to the photograph I shared yesterday — same lake, same morning, similar subject, different trees, and islands instead of a peninsula this time. Once again, though, the trees on the islands and ascending the granite slopes beyond are illuminated by beautiful morning Sierra Nevada back light. To those familiar with the Sierra, this scene likely speaks of many things, but perhaps two in particular. First, is the nature of the forest — different from in many other locations, largely due to its generally more open character. (Some have proposed that the “Range of Light” name may be partially on account of this aspect of the Sierra experience.) Second, and perhaps a bit less obvious at first glance, is the evidence of glaciation. This lake was almost certainly scooped out by those forces, and the dome-like slopes beyond also suggest glacial sculpting.

As I have mentioned as recently as my previous post, I love photographing Sierra subjects — especially trees — in backlight, especially if a there is a bit of haze to produce a sense of distance between foreground and back ground and a bit of “glow” in the atmosphere. This kind of light can extend the hours for photography since it often works even when the early and late golden hour light is not present.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake

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Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake
A full autumn moon rises above Mono Lake at dusk.

Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A full autumn moon rises above Mono Lake at dusk.

There are still a few more photographs in this series of autumn evening images from Mono Lake that I made a few years ago. These come from that pandemic photographic genre that we might call “photographs that would have been lost forever if forced isolation had not given me a great reason to look through my old files.” (Maybe you have a shorter title?) I know I’m not the only one dong this. Travel has, of course, been complicated for a year and a half. I’ve been out, and I’ve even been to Mono Lake during this interval, but the opportunities seem greatly diminished. But there are tens of thousands of raw files in my archives, and it has been productive to spend time going back through them and discovering things I had left behind. (How that happens would be a great subject for a long post sometime.)

On this autumn evening I timed by arrival at Mono Lake for right around sunset. I knew that the full moon would rise over those distant mountains east of Mono Basin, and I expected that the moon world rise while there was still some light in the sky. This is ideal in many ways, since the remaining ambient light is often colorful, it illuminates landscape details, and it reduces the contrast between the bright moon and the darker scene. In several of the photographs —working very quickly! — I used a much longer focal length to enlarge the moon. But for this one I backed off and included much more of the surrounding landscape and the lake.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Surf, Sand, and Rocks

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Surf, Sand, and Rocks
Rocky islands and peninsulas surround a small bay at a southern oregon beach.

Surf, Sand, and Rocks. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Rocky islands and peninsulas surround a small bay at a southern oregon beach.

This photograph is the partner of another from the same location that I posted recently. This spot is along the lower coast of Oregon, not too far above the northern California border. We had been visiting the California coastal redwoods in the upper part of the state, and we decided to make a day trip across the border and up that coast. We had no specific goal in mind — well, not beyond finding a place for breakfast along the way — so we just headed north to see what we would find.

We were not expecting to find any particular “icons,” we were freed to stop at whatever seemed interesting. I don’t know that name of these formation, and my only way of identifying them was to record a mileage marker along the route. The large stone features here stand in shallow water — in some places literally on the beach. I chose the vertical format for this photograph to emphasize the view across the beach and the little bay between the rocks, leading the eye to the distant horizon and fog bank.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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