Tag Archives: landscape

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Wetlands Tree, Evening

January 16, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A last beam of evening light illuminates a lone tree in San Joaquin Valley wetlands

My recollection of this early winter, late December day in the San Joaquin Valley is that it was mostly a foggy and gray day, with direct light being quite rare. I’m usually fine with that, since the fog is certainly a strong element in the character of the place at this time of the year and because I like photographing in cloudy, foggy, and misty conditions. (Gray is another story… ;-) On a day like this, while I’m happy to see some glow through the clouds and fog, I’m also often just fine with conditions that some might regard as boring.

Sometimes, even on a gray day, there are surprises. We had photographed all morning, taken a brief break away from here to grab some lunch, and then returned to photograph in the middle afternoon and on into the evening. For the most part, the combination of some fog and high clouds kept things fairly “atmospheric” for the rest of the day. But not long before sunset there was one of these “surprises.” To be honest, when I am watching the conditions carefully and predicting where they might lead, there are less likely to be literal surprises. Perhaps they are better described as positive evolutions of potential conditions. In this case, even though it was cloudy and gray, I had my eyes on the possibility that the sun might briefly shine through a gap along the horizon just before sunset. And that is exactly what happened! For a brief span of a few minutes the light gradually warmed and intensified, starting almost imperceptibly but soon becoming quite obvious. As this happened I move quickly to this nearby spot where I had photographed this tree many times before and therefore knew that it could be my central subject, standing out in the warm light against the flat valley marshes and flatland extending into the distance.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Wetlands Sunrise, Winter

January 15, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The sun rises above wetlands, barely visible through San Joaquin Valley winter fog

We arrived at this place in California’s San Joaquin Valley well before dawn on New Year’s Day — with some of us having driven as many as two hours in the dark to get there. After the drive, it is always a special moment when we get out of our cars in the cold for warm greetings and hear the sound of cranes and geese waking up in the dark distance. Knowing that the sunrise won’t wait for us, we then turn to unpacking cameras and tripods and to fitting lenses, and then we move out along the perimeter road to find the right combination of birds and atmosphere and light for photographing the dawn that will begin our full day of photography.

This morning was foggy, but not so foggy that we would not see the sunrise. With this in mind we headed to the west side of the wetlands, where we could have a view back across the flatlands and ponds toward the sun rising above the fog and the distant Sierra Nevada. As the sky began to glow we each estimated where we thought the sun would appear, and we found good spots to set up our cameras. As the very top of the orb of the sun appeared on the horizon I quickly made a small adjustment to my location to place the sunrise between the two distant tree silhouettes and to include some interesting foreground water. This was one of the very first exposures I made, at a point where the sun was still so obscured behind the low fog that I could look directly at it — within moments it rose above the ground mist and became extremely bright. I continued to photograph, but in the end this first photograph of soft light, fog, and pastel colors was my favorite.

Equipment, Morning Musings, Technique

Lenses for Landscape Photography (Morning Musings 1/12/15)

January 12, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This isn’t exactly a regular “morning musings” post, but I wanted to share this stuff and it seemed like a good pretext! This post concerns two related articles at the website:

From time to time I share new posts in my “Photographic Myths and Platitudes” series. These articles deal with common ideas about photography that range from “open to question” to quite wrong. I try to look at these issues from a perspective that is both objective and based on actual photographic practice.

I wrote the first of these two articles about lenses for DSLR landscape photography back in 2010 after reading one too many claims that wide-angle lenses are landscape lenses and that longer focal lengths are not good ‘landscape lenses.’ It shouldn’t be a surprise that I disagree. The first article goes over reasons to consider a wide range of focal lengths for photographing landscape.

When I wrote that first article I realized that there was another notion about landscape photography that needed a closer look, a belief that prime lenses are better than zoom lenses for landscape photography. This long-cherished idea probably has its roots back in an earlier period of photography when all photography (not to mention all landscape photography) was done with prime lenses, and in a somewhat later period when early zoom lenses had some serious shortcomings. But things are a lot different today, and most of the excellent contemporary DSLR (and a great deal of medium format) landscape photography that you see and enjoy today was done with zoom lenses.

Knowing what a sensitive issue this is for some photographers, I delayed writing part II for over four years! I’ll acknowledge in advance that there are some reasons to shoot landscape subjects with non-zoom lenses, and that my perspective is not The Truth about landscape photography lenses. However, I’m certain that the majority of landscape photographers will be best served by today’s excellent zoom lenses.

In any case, part II deals with this issue, and it is available now. I hope you’ll enjoy it and perhaps learn something new.

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. Connections to photography may be tenuous at times!

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Juniper, Boulder, Cliff

January 12, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small juniper tree grows next to a sandstone boulder at the bottom of a cliff, Capitol Reef National Park

I’m digging back into the October Utah photographs yet again for this one. It comes from Capitol Reef National Park, where I spent about three days out of a longer visit to Utah. I started in far southwest Utah, wandered a bit in the Vermillion Cliffs area, followed a back road north to highway 12, then headed over Boulder Mountain to the Park, where I met a friend and got a campsite for a few days.

I’m gradually pushing out the boundaries of my knowledge of this park, and part of that growth on this trip involved shooting in some tricky light. On this late afternoon, between some other subjects, we ended up in a well-traveled canyon as the tall canyon walls and some cloudiness softened the light. After reaching our furthest point in the canyon we turned around and started back, and as we passed back through one twisting section we saw several interesting photographic possibilities, stopped, and spent a bit of time looking and photographing. This small juniper tree stood in front of an old red rock boulder, and the green of the tree and red of the rock complemented one another. I was also fascinated by the complex, angled, and sometimes-curving patterns on the vertical cliff wall in the background.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: landscape

Wetlands Tree, Evening

Wetlands Sunrise, Winter

Lenses for Landscape Photography (Morning Musings 1/12/15)

Juniper, Boulder, Cliff

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