Fall colors and mist along the Merced River, Yosemite Valley.
Returning to the land of color – after a spate of recent black and white posts – this is a photograph made on a rainy day along the Merced River in Yosemite Valley, as fall color came to the trees and bushes and fog drifted along the walls of the Valley. This photograph was made from the bridge near Curry Village as it rained lightly and the colors were reflected in the calm surface of the river. Probably because of the damp weather and the relatively early hour there was hardly any one else around, and this in a location that is often quite busy.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Cattle graze in front of large aspen groves near Conway Summit, California.
Just about anyone who has every photographed aspens in the area around Lee Vining is probably familiar with this location – and I’ve certainly shot there quite a few times. From highway 395 the aspens extend west and up toward the peaks of the Sierra crest, and the at the right hour in the late afternoon the backlight can light up the leaves of the trees. When I visited this time the trees were in transition with some still green, others very colorful, and some almost leafless already. I was also lucky to have some clouds at the end of several cloudless days of photography. (Normal people like perfect blue sky, but photographers are not normal – we tend to like weather!) When I saw the clouds starting to form above the crest early in the afternoon I thought that something interesting might happen later near Conway so I made a point of heading that direction.
This photograph features, of all things, cattle – not my usual subject, perhaps! The area where these aspens grow seems to be at least as much a pasture as it is aspen groves, and I’ve seen cattle grazing in this spot before. (See comments for a note from a member of the family that owns the land.) As the clouds created shadows over the higher slopes in the background, for a moment the sun still hit the foreground trees and these cattle.
This shot also ties in with my recent post on using various focal lengths for landscape photography, in that this photograph was made with what some might regard as an unlikely landscape lens, a 100-400mm zoom! But in this case, this lens at 250mm was just what I needed to more tightly frame the bit of foreground pasture and sunlit trees and compress the distance between them and the shadowed hills beyond.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Slender aspen trunks and intense yellow leaves along the south fork of Bishop Creek.
I found these beautiful white-trunk trees growing in a long row alongside one of the forks of Bishop Creek in the early evening. I had been in this area before to shoot different subjects nearby, but these trees had not been colorful on that occasion so I had pretty much ignored them.
There are things I like about this photo, such as the light color and parallel lines of the tree trunks and the bits of leaves and plants below them, but I have some ideas about how I would like to shoot this scene differently next time. So I’m going to count it as a sort of scouting report shot and try to return to this spot next season.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Fall aspen trees drop yellow leaves on a boulder in the Bishop Creek drainage, Sierra Nevada, California.
I made this photograph in very low evening light – as those who have looked at the technical information and noticed the four second exposure time have already figured out. I was shooting in canyon on a cloudy evening with light rain late in the day – so it should be no surprise that there was little light. What the light lacks in intensity at this time of day, it makes up for by being so diffused and soft that the shadows light up in ways that aren’t seen during the regular daylight hours.
On a day of gentle rain and overcast, the wind had died down in the evening, allowing the long exposure necessary for this photograph. The colorful aspens almost seem to glow in this light, and the golden leaves had first caught my attention. But as I looked at this little scene the leaves that had fallen across the boulder and the nearly white colors of the tree trunks also intrigued me.
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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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