Tag Archives: landsscape

Valley, Spring

Valley, Spring
A California valley during the “impossibly green” season.

Valley, Spring. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

A California valley during the “impossibly green” season.

To be perfectly honest, this is a bit of a “record shot” — a photograph made at least as much to record something as to have an aesthetic effect. The location is a park not far from where I live, a place where I have hiked and photographed for several decades. It is part of my “outdoors backyard,” a place where I almost feel a sense of ownership now. I’ve even made other photographs from almost this precise location, though in rather different (and more dramatic) conditions.

The photograph is also a record of a California phenomenon, what some have called the ‘impossibly green season” — that amazing annual eruption of grasses and other plants in a typically dry landscape. At a time when much of the country is deep in winter, many places in California turn more green than you can imagine.


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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Sierra Aspen Groves, Autumn

Sierra Aspen Groves, Autumn
Sierra Aspen Groves, Autumn

Sierra Aspen Groves, Autumn. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. October 12, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Aspen groves in varying states of autumn color, eastern Sierra Nevada

This photograph was a bit of an unplanned surprise. (The truth is that quite few aspen photographs are just that — partly because I’m always looking around for places I haven’t photographed before, and partly because one never knows what the aspen conditions will like until arrival on the scene.) I had started my morning with a plan that evolved a bit. Up well before sunrise, my initial plan to was to explore an area of east-facing slopes along the edge of the Sierra where I knew that colorful trees would be scattered about. As I drove to what seemed like the obvious starting point, I thought about a very large grove that I had earlier spotted very high up on these slopes… and as I looked that direction I saw a set of headlights up there! That was all the encouragement I needed to find a narrow a steep track that took me way up high on a ridge from which I photographed those trees at dawn.

When I finished shooting there I took a few minutes to finally eat something and then figured that I would try a “sure bet” location nearby. I drove back down the single-track gravel route, got back on pavement, and headed there. Sure enough, there was a lot of brilliant color in this area. As I drove up the road I spotted rows of aspens at the edge of a meadow, still in soft shaded light, but not seeing a photograph there and with my mind on another subject up ahead, I kept going. Before long I was done with that “other subject” and I decided to head toward a third (and non-aspen) subject, so I turned around and headed back the way I came. As I passed this spot again, something about the light and the trees caught my attention again — mainly the soft effect of light reflected into this shaded grove — so I stopped and made a series of photographs that mostly just “show what is” about these 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.
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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.