The last autumn aspen leaves hang from the branches of nearly bare trees against a granite cliff
So many aspen photographs focus on the wild autumn colors — for good reason! But this is not the only interesting phase of the autumn transition, and I also like the reappearance of the bare, white trunks of the trees as the leaves drop away.
I made this photograph late in the day and in a canyon area where little light penetrates after mid-afternoon, and where trees grow right up against a jumbled granite cliff that is fractured and full of blocks and angles. Late in the day, when the only light comes from the blue sky overhead, the quality of the light becomes quite cold. (At this time of year the air also becomes cold quickly late in the day!) I stuck around after most others had left and photographed these nearly bare trunks into the blue hour period.
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
Trees on a ledge above a deep granite backcountry canyon catch the last light of the day
Late on this afternoon several of us wandered of to a nearby promontory, from which panoramic views of a large section of the Yosemite high country were available, along with more intimate subjects of granite boulders and trees growing tenuously on granite slabs. This is fun terrain to explore — open enough that you can go wherever you can find a way and wherever your skills and comfort with heights will permit, yet full on surprising little features worth seeing and photographing.
Soon the light began to fade from this high point as the sun dropped to the horizon, and it was time to start back toward camp. If I timed things just right I could shoot a bit into the post-sunset evening light and still have enough light left to pick my way down the ridge and then through the lakeside forest in diminishing light. As I descended along the spine of a glaciated granite ridge, the views overlooked the gorge of the Tuolumne River, and this valley was filled with luminous blue hour light. I found a spot with a fairly clear view across slightly lower, tree-covered ledges, and made a few photographs into the canyon, using my hands to shield the lens from the last bit of direct light before the sun dropped below the horizon.
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
The last vestiges of dissipating afternoon rain showers fall over the Cottonwood Mountains, Death Valley National Park
I have written in the past, here and elsewhere, about how I “see”—which is a very complicated subject and one that I sometime struggle to explain. (Here I think of the quote attributed to Ansel Adams: “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” Those who know me may scoff at the possibility of the “silence” part of this, but still…) One aspect of my seeing, and one that I know I share with other photographers, is that I carry around a sort of mental library of visual bits and pieces, light and color and things that I want to see and, in fact, expect to see at some point. I am aware that some of these come from far back in my memory, and I can even associate them with experiences when I was quite young. One category of these “bits and pieces” has to do with curtains of rain falling across mountain ridges. When I was quite young, my family went on a drive to Southern California and on the way we drove across an agricultural valley, and still today the image I saw of rain falling in the mountains we were about to cross is still clear in my mind as is the magical impression that it made on my young mind.
So, in a sense, this is yet another working out of that category of subjects from the mental image library. These are very different mountains from those I saw so many years ago, but the them of semi-transparent sheets of rain falling in front of mountain ridges and obscuring the details is the same. These ridges are in the Cottonwood Mountains, a sub-range of Death Valley National Park’s Panamint Range. The rarely look quite like this, being a very arid, rugged, and austere desert range. But this was a day of rain (and snow!) and late in the day, as we photographed from an elevated location out in Death Valley, the weather began to clear and the clouds dissipated, leaving behind final backlit curtains of falling rain above the mountains.
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
Trees, fog, and snow on the granite summit of El Capitan glow in a final beam of sunset light.
Near the beginning of March I was in Yosemite Valley for three days in conjunction with the opening of the Yosemite Renaissance XXIX exhibit. (One of my photographs is in the show.) It was a wonderful weekend in many ways. Lots of artists of all sorts were there for the opening—and for Yosemite!—and I had the chance to get together with many friends among them. It was also a time of atmospheric conditions that were spectacular in ways that interest me as a photographer – broken light, occasional rain, mist and clouds.
On this evening we went to Tunnel View since it was mostly gray down in the Valley and because there was some promise of not only drifting clouds and mist there, but also of some late day light. All of those things happened, but as the end of the day approached, the “lights went out” as the clouds to the west thickened and blocked the setting sun. I continued to shoot for a while, mostly focusing a long lens on small distant details within the scene, but I finally decided that the light was simply becoming too flat and I walked back to the car to pack up, thinking about the friends I would soon join for dinner in the Valley. At the back of the car I removed the long lens, collapsed the tripod, and was packing everything away when Patty, who was sitting the front seat and facing the valley, exclaimed, “Look at that light!” Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much, but when I looked up I saw a blood red band of light stretching across the cliffs of El Capitan on the left and Sentinel Rocks on the right. Apparently the sun had found a narrow gap in the clouds almost exactly at the point it reached the horizon far to the west. I immediately knew that this light would be gone very quickly—at best it might last a minute or two—so I worked very quickly to set up the tripod, attach the camera, and stick a long lens on it… not even looking up at the view as I worked. No time to look! I quickly moved the camera to the nearest possible shooting location and, working almost entirely intuitively, quickly picked out perhaps four different shots, each focusing on the momentarily best bit of light as the scene evolved quickly. The final bit of light was a rapidly fading stripe just across the snow- and cloud-shrouded summit of El Capitan, where the upper rocks, snow, and trees picked up the intense red light for a matter of a few seconds, and then it was gone.
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
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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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.
