Tag Archives: landscape

Photographs: Germany, Photographs: Nature

Alps, Berechtesgaden National Park

May 25, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Alps, Berchtesgaden National Park — A trail passes through the Bavarian Alps of Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany

A trail passes through the Bavarian Alps of Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany

This was a special day on our three-week 2013 trip to England, Germany and a bit of Austria. Most of the trip, not surprisingly, was a rather urban experience. (I like those, too!) Particularly in London, the least urbanized part of the experience were brief visits to urban parks. Heidelberg perhaps had a less intensely urban feeling, though it still is very definitely a town/city environment for the most part. When we got off the train in Salzburg we were most certainly in another urbanized place, and even the beautiful area where we stayed in a Bavarian farmhouse was quite civilized — a town was a short distance away and we could walk to bakeries and even a restaurant. From the yard of the farmhouse we could look up to the alpine heights of the Watzmann, a truly alpine peak and the second highest in Germany, but it was something to look towards rather than a place to be.

This day started in a similar civilized manner: a drive to a large parking lot, purchasing tickets, and then getting on the Jennerbahn tram. The tram ride was, of course, spectacular as it took us up to a mountaintop lodge. But when we stepped out of that lodge and onto a system of trails that took us across a high ridge with views of spectacular alpine terrain and then dropped us into the top of a long high valley, this Sierra Nevada guy felt the familiar pull of mountains.

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Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Death Valley, Evening

May 19, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light on the playa of Death Valley, with lower slopes of the Panamint Mountains rising beyond

Since I’ve been traveling to and around Death Valley National Park for more than 15 years now, I’ve seen a lot of the park — but I most certainly have not see all of it, nor have I completely learned how to see everything in it. This is a huge place, varying greatly by location, terrain, season, weather and more. Frankly, the experience of coming to know such a place over time is one of the things I value most about such locations. While I love to “discover” a place that is completely new to me (and Death Valley was that place in the late 1990s for me), the longer process of learning the place and its rhythms more deeply is also, I think, more rewarding. It is wonderful to see a desert gully in evening light for the first time, but it may be even more beautiful to come back to it and recognize an old and familiar friend.

Along these lines, a few years ago, as I continued to push out my own boundaries of experience and knowledge in Death Valley, I began to think more about how to make photographs of things that I might have not thought worthy of a photograph before. I realized that many of these things that don’t scream “photograph me!” are otherwise a core part of the experience of this place: a vast and quiet “empty” landscape, midday sun, haze obscuring great distances, the edge between the last vegetation and a barren playa, a beam of light slanting across an alluvial fan. And if they are central to the sense of the place, it seems that there must be a way to photograph them. And that is a new challenge for me in my Death Valley photography.

Photographs: Germany, Photographs: Nature

Bavarian Alps, Berchtesgaden National Park

May 18, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Bavarian Alps rise above Königsee in Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany

Over the course of a summer week in 2013 we had a lot of opportunities to gaze at these Bavarian Alps. We spent a week with family in the Berchtesgaden area, staying in a big farm-house with views across a bucolic valley and into the mountains as they rose to the summit of the Watzmann, the second-highest peak in Germany. We did the “tourist thing” and rode the electric boats up the Königsee Lake between high ridges, and on one memorable day we visited Jennerbahn, took the tram to the top, and spent the rest of the day descending alpine valleys on foot — with a mid-hike stop for snacks and a beer!

During our stay I think I got a sense of how these mountains are different from my “home range” of the Sierra Nevada — though I would need a much longer stay and more hiking to get to know them well. Because they are built from different sorts of rock, the shapes of the peaks are often quite different. The tall rugged peaks also rise almost directly from relative lowlands — for example, a short hike took us from the lake to the base of a huge cliff at Die Eiskapelle, a place that felt thoroughly alpine. In the Sierra we have kept vast stretches of the range relatively wild, isolated from human structures to the point that one can imagine that he/she is in a fully wild place. In the alps there are huts, and you can stop for a beer in the middle of an afternoon hike! The ridges and valley in this photograph rise from the shoreline of the Königsee.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: Wildlife

Cormorants, Coastal Rocks

May 15, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Cormorants nesting on rugged coastal rocks at Point Lobos State Reserve, California

Following a significant bit of photography near the end of April and the beginning of May, I had hardly picked up my camera for nearly a month — and I was itching to get out and make new photographs. Time was still tight, but I found a free day and headed off to the coastal areas of the Monterey Peninsula and the northern reaches of the Big Sur coastline, ending up at Point Lobos. Frankly, as much as I wanted to make photographs, I also simply wanted to get outside for a bit, and a morning of hiking and photographing here fit the bill perfectly.

The rock in the distance on which some cormorants are nesting is actually an island — an island that at some times of year is covered with many hundreds of all kinds of shore birds. This time there were far fewer. It could have been a seasonal thing, or it might be related to the changes in ocean temperature that have caused harm to marine mammals this season. In any case, I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose the small group of black birds with a landscape of rugged rock, so I wandered a bit until I found this camera position that put nothing but rocks between me and the island.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: landscape

Alps, Berechtesgaden National Park

Death Valley, Evening

Bavarian Alps, Berchtesgaden National Park

Cormorants, Coastal Rocks

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