Tag Archives: leaves

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

Birch Trunks, Fall Foliage

Image October 26, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

White birch tree trunks emerge from a sea of fall color, New England.

For this California photographer, the autumn. Eastern Sierra aspens are some of the most interesting trees. Their leaves can certainly be colorful — often yellow/gold, but also ranging through orange and red. But their white or near-white trunks set them apart. They are fascinating no matter what the leaves are doing — spring. green, autumn color, or winter bare. I take it that there are aspens in New England, though their presence is overwhelmed by the other trees that we don’t see in California. As I photographed in the Northeast it seemed to me that that birch trees are more or less the aspen surrogates there, and they often provide similarly interesting trunk structures.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of Northeastern fall color, to the point that it sometimes is difficult to make a photograph of the subject. I know that may sound strange — those colors are exciting, so why not just point the camera at them and make pictures? That’s exactly the problem. It is easy for the colors to be the whole show, so I look for other things that can tie them together in some sort of form. Tree trunks can often do this. A few trunks slicing, twisting, or slanting through a scene can give it direction and flow that is hard to achieve in a photograph of just the colorful leaves.

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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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Grove, Red and Gold

Image October 25, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Red and gold autumn color in an Eastern Sierra Nevada aspen grove.

A small change in a subject can alter how we see it and even make photographs possible in a location that might have not worked in the past. I have driven past this grove scores of times, occasionally stopping to. look at some colorful nearby trees. But I never took the time to walk just a little bit further to this camera position. Why not? Often there are too many people here, and when I usually visit the color is not at its prime. But this time I came about a week later and on a quiet weekday. The color was much more interesting, and the entire time I was there I saw only one other person.

The beginning of the Sierra aspen color season is a special time, and the beginning of the transition never fails to catch my attention. My favorite time frame is usually the first two weeks of October, perhaps because the start of the change is so compelling. But things are different — and equally interesting — a bit later, following that early color peak. I made this photograph in the third week of the month, when trees at the higher elevations had already lost most of their leaves. Even here a lot of foliage had fallen. However, this meant that virtually all of the remaining leaves were shades of yellow, orange, and red… and the thinner foliage revealed the white aspen trunks.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

Leaves, Boulders in the Stream

Image October 24, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn leaves lie on builders in the middle of a White Mountains forest stream.

After we stopped here to photograph a couple of lonely creeks passing though hardwood forest along a remote backroad I looked around for smaller subjects within the larger scene that had originally convinced me to stop. I had been looking at the forest as a whole, set off by the stream following a path bending beneath the canopy of trees. Eventually I thought to look more or less at my feet, where I noticed fallen leaves on boulders around which the creeks flowed.

Photographing these dense forest scenes in the Northeast can be something of a challenge. I’m used to more open forests that I see on the West Coast, where the light shines in between the trees, and the view extends some distance. In New England the trees are smaller and grow more densely, and it is often difficult to see more than a few feet into the woods, and even more difficult to find a view that without a trunk, branch, or stick intruding into the frame. All of this is by way of saying that it was not at all easy to isolate this little scene!

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

Autumn Forest and Creek

Image October 22, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A creek flows beneath autumn trees in the White Mountains of New Hampshire

This is a photograph of another branch of the creek that was featured in a recent photograph. The creek in the previous photograph flowed under a bridge to join the creek seen here. Both flowed down gentle rocky sloped though a quiet hardwood forest that was perhaps just past the prime color. On a day when crowds were visiting the more famous sites in this mountain range, it was pleasant to stop here in the still quiet for a while.

People from the Northeast who have me advice on this trip recommended several thing. Some had to do with timing, some with the typical transitions of the color. Others were about locations — and as a first-time visitor to this area I needed that advice. In addition to pointing out some of the must-see locations, almost everyone also said to get off the main roads and poke around some of the backroads, especially the smaller gravel routes. This was one of those, a road that we followed on a whim — and we ended up off the beaten path in places that are not as frequently visited.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: leaves

Birch Trunks, Fall Foliage

Aspen Grove, Red and Gold

Leaves, Boulders in the Stream

Autumn Forest and Creek

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