Downtown Chicago skyline above the mouth of the Chicago River and Lake Shore Drive
I’m sharing this photograph not because it is a work of great photographic art but because it so clearly shows its subject, the entrance to the Chicago River, the bridge for Lakeshore Drive, and the core of tall towers along the river in central downtown Chicago, light by morning sun.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
Autumn foliage on a steep, rocky eastern Sierra Nevada slope
This is a bit of a complicated photograph, and I’ll try to make some sense out of it below. The back story is that I was in the eastern Sierra doing some fall color photography, and early on this Saturday morning I had gone to a fairly popular location for photography. It is a place that I’ve photographed many times, going all the way back to a few years ago just before the huge popularity of digital cameras began to bring sometimes-overwhelming numbers of photographers to the area. I was quite sure that there would be large groups there on this morning, including photography workshop participants lined up along the shoreline of the nearby lake, but I also knew that there would be plenty of other things for me to photograph without joining the crowd.
I began by making some photographs of small things — little vignettes of a few aspen leaves, some rocks and boulders, light shining through branches holding colorful leaves. As I did this I saw that the far side of the canyon was going to remain in shadow after the sun began to wash things out elsewhere, so I decided to use a long lens and photograph trees and rocks in that location from a distance. Most of the photographs feature more obvious subjects such as an individual grove of colorful trees, but in this one I decided to just go with the complexity of the scene, which includes broken rocks, brush, and a few small aspen trees.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
Morning light and reflections of the rocky shoreline of a subalpine lake surrounded by forest, Yosemite National Park
At first glance a subalpine lake may look much like many other subalpine lakes. And, in fact, these lakes do tend to share some of the same sorts of features if they are in the same terrain and at the same elevation. Along the shoreline trees may march right down to the water’s edge, boulders may interrupt the shoreline and extend into the lake, there may be islands, it is often flat and marshy near the outlet stream, and higher slopes will often rise above the lake.
However, spend time at any such lake and it inevitably begins to reveal its own unique personality. Spend a lot of time at one lake — a period of at least a few days — and things that you overlooked at first become more obvious and may even come to be part of what defines the lake’s character. As soon as we arrived at this lake we all gravitated to the west shore in the early morning, from which we could photograph back across the lake and into the morning light, letting it fringe nearer trees against the backdrop of the shadowed trees on the other side. But further exploration — otherwise known as “wandering slowly around the lake many times” — began to reveal all sorts of possible alignments and juxtapositions. Here the morning light casts shadow patterns beneath the surface of the reflection water, and the near and far rocky areas seem to connect across the lake.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
Yachts tied up along the Chicago waterfront near the mouth of the Chicago River
This photograph was made from one of the Chicago architecture tour boats as it paused in the small bay near the mouth of the Chicago river before turning and heading back into the river. This location momentarily provided a bit of distance between my position and the buildings and gave me a clearer shot of the group of them, and the low position on the water emphasize the height of the buildings.
If you like the combination of very new and slightly old architecture found in Chicago — and I do — a view like this one seems to perfectly capture the ideal image of the lake front of this city. Producing a form that reminds me of ascending mountain peaks, each building is part of a progression that culminates in the tallest building whose mass is mostly hidden by those in front.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
