Tag Archives: leaves

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

Autumn Leaves, Layered Sandstone with Diagonal Crack

April 6, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small plant with yellow autumn leaves grows from a diagonal crack in wall of layered sandstone, Zion National Park

I’ll start off by admitting that I now don’t recall exactly where I made this photograph on this day when we visited Zion National Park. I’m virtually certain that it in the high country along the Mt. Carmel Highway that crosses the park from east to west, but where on that highway I’m not certain. Of course, some crack in the rock with a bush growing out of it hardly is likely to be an iconic, named location!

What I do recall is that we spent a good portion of this first trip’s first day in Zion along this road, and to some extent driving back and forth along it a few times, watching for new subjects as the day’s light evolved. At times a cliff that had been in sun earlier in the day would be in shadow later, so we had a choice to photograph in soft light or harsh. All along this roadway there were the usual interesting subjects – sedimentary rock formations of all sorts and all colors – but also at this time of year the fall color show was beginning. I believe that this little vignette might have been down in one of the washes or slot canyons that we dropped into in search of this color.

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

Gambel Oak Leaves, Autumn

April 3, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Brilliantly colored autumn colors of Gambel Oak leaves, Capitol Reef National Park

This is a very different view of the autumn gambel oak leaves than another that I recently posted. That other photograph showed the perhaps more typical brown or tan phase of fall oak leaf color. This one, on the other hand, shows a particularly colorful specimen of these leaves, caught at perhaps just the right moment and in the right light in a canyon of Capitol Reef National Park early one late-October morning.

The angle from which you view these leaves matters a lot, as it often does with autumn leaves in general. The nature of the ambient light also makes a big difference. And did I mention the timing!? If you can get a bit of back-light behind the oak leaves, what might otherwise be a bit dull can begin to glow. And the soft, diffused lighting in this deep canyon setting allowed the light to fill in the shadows. These particular specimens possess very interesting color and shape patterns: there is an interior still-green section on many of the leaves that is just beginning to edge towards yellow-gold, and it is surrounded by brilliantly red and orange leaf edges. When I shoot in deep shade – and these plants were deep in the shade of this small canyon – I often find that the photograph seems unnaturally blue, given that most of the light is either direct or reflected blue sky. In most cases, in order to get a color balance that reflects what the eye saw – and our visual system compensates for the blue saturation – I have to alter the color balance a bit and move it away from this artificial-seeming blueness. However, in this case, if I adjusted far enough to neutralize the blue that you can still see on the more-or-less gray branches and twigs, the color of the leaves would probably defy belief!

Photographs: Urban/Street

Woman in Black, Sidewalk, Petals

April 2, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The legs of a woman wearing black, cracked sidewalk, bright flower petals.

This is a photograph that I might not have gotten if I had been working in my more typical manner – e.g. shooting with a full frame DSLR and an assortment of lenses. Instead, I was shooting with a small rangefinder-style mirrorless camera and only a 14mm prime. (Roughly equivalent about a 24mm prime on a full frame camera.) Shooting this way encourages working quickly – with a single focal length there is much less to think about, and shooting happens more quickly and, in some ways, more instinctively.

For what its worth, the photograph was made while walking in San Diego’s Balboa Park, near a spot where these brilliantly colorful flower petals were falling from a nearby tree. I suddenly got the idea to shoot the lens and feet of the people walking in front of me, and it was serendipitous that this happened as we were walking through the flower petals.

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Trillium Flower and Leaves

March 28, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A single trillium flower grows in the redwood forest of Muir Woods National Monument

I was brought up mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. (I like to describe myself as a “virtual native” of California, since I’ve lived here since I was four years old.) When I was a child my parents would often – or so it seemed to me – bundle us into the family car for day trips to many of the nearby areas where I photograph on day trips today: Point Lobos, Pinnacles National Monument (now National Park), San Francisco, Big Basin State Park. One of the main attractions of Big Basin is the presence of coast redwood trees. I suppose that because I’ve always known trees this large that they don’t shock me the way that they do visitors who haven’t seen them before – but every once in a while I realize just how remarkable their size is.

However, with all of my youthful visits to redwood forests, it seems odd to admit that I never saw the trillium flowers there until I was much older. In retrospect, I’m pretty certain that visiting such places was a warm weather event in my family – and trillium blossoms appear at a time of the year when things are still distinctly wet and chilly. Now I try to see them every late winter and early spring, and to photograph them if possible. With this goal, I made a one day trip to the redwoods of Marin County north of San Francisco last week, making sure to arrive very early, before the hordes of tourist buses would arrive from nearby San Francisco. I managed to get a couple of hours in the deep early morning shade of the redwood forest to photograph these flowers before the sun and the other visitors arrived, making photography less appealing. Those who may not have seen the plant in the wild might be surprised at its form. Beneath the three trios of leaves/flowers that you see in this photograph, the whole affair is supported on a single long and bare step that rises vertically from the forest floor. The flowers, which can range in color from pure white through pink to a sort of dark and dusty burgundy, don’t last long, and if you aren’t there during the short interval when they blossom you might not notice them at all.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: leaves

Autumn Leaves, Layered Sandstone with Diagonal Crack

Gambel Oak Leaves, Autumn

Woman in Black, Sidewalk, Petals

Trillium Flower and Leaves

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