Tag Archives: light

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Forest Edge, Mountain Slopes, Evening

August 20, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Forest edge in evening light with forest sloping upwards toward Sierra crest peaks

This is most certainly not an iconic view, but I’m sure that many fellow Yosemite high country aficionados have been to this spot and gazed at this and the surrounding view. (Part of one Yosemite high country icon does appear in this photograph, but it is the bottom part.)

Earlier on this visit to the park I had walked out into this landscape to photograph in the meadow, on low hills, among trees, and alongside a river. As I passed by here again on this early evening I stopped and was entranced by the warm evening light on the trees at the edge of the meadow and by the further forest-covered slopes rising into the alpine zone and eventually above tree line to the elevations where there is little but rock and tundra plants. While the landscape often seems rather static during the day, at moments like this near the beginning and ending of the day the landscape changes dynamically as light shifts and highlights and then shadows subjects. I had only a brief moment to make this photograph (and a couple of others) before the light lifted from the trees and left them in shadow.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Pine Trees, Morning

August 17, 2015 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

A small grove of high elevation pine trees in morning Sierra Nevada light

Although I visit the Sierra frequently, it has been some time since my last real backpacking trip and even longer since I last me up with my “Talusdancers” friends. The Talusdancers go way back — to a time about two decades ago when a loosely organized group of us began joining regularly for Sierra backcountry trips that ranged from a few days to longer than a week. In early August I had the opportunity to get these things back on track, with a three-day backpack trip in the eastern Sierra with three of the old gang. I arrived before the others, was on the trail by mid-afternoon, and had set up camp and was fixing dinner before the sun set. My friends apparently got to the trailhead much later and didn’t start hiking until about 6:00 PM. As the sun was setting I heard the “holler” of my friend Owen coming from across the valley, and I yelled back to let him know I as there. They soon arrived, and I can report that there are few things more wonderful that meeting up in the backcountry with good friends you have not seen for some time!

Our camp was on a rise above the shore of a sub-alpine lake, a very familiar Sierra Nevada setting. Beyond the lake to the west the terrain rises, past more lakes and thinning trees, into the alpine zone, and eventually to Sierra crest peaks and ridge lines. To the east there was a long valley with several more lakes, ending at a drop off between the descending canyon walls, and in the far distance we could see the high desert of Owens Valley and even further off the line of the White Mountains. We camped in the midst of an open grove of small, high-elevation lodgepole pines, common Sierra trees, but always beautiful in the early morning light.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Fog, Water, Light

August 12, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A beam of light on water below fog, Pacific Ocean

Living very close to the Pacific coast of California for nearly my entire life, the ocean has always “been there” — just on the other side of coastal mountains, hardly more than a half hour away, bringing cooling evening breezes on hot summer days, and producing periodic morning fog where I live. On one hand I am more familiar with this landscape than most people, but in recent years I began to feel that I know much less about it than I should. These photographs made with the camera pointing straight out to see are something of a them of mine, not as frequent as photographs of mountains perhaps, but important nonetheless. They might include fog or winter swell or clearing storm clouds or simply the brilliant light on the water from the western sun. To me they are all a bit mysterious.

We had spent a couple of days along the Big Sur coast photographing (and eating!). The main part of the visit was over, but we had a full day to get home, and home was only about an hour and a half away. So we took our time and followed the coast almost all the way north to San Francisco before turning inland. During much of the drive we were in the sun, but north of Santa Cruz the fog began to appear, and eventually we arrived at that point where the offshore fog bank was substantial enough to form a virtual wall against the light. We stopped and I photographed as the eastern edge of the fog picked up a bit of light and the sun broke through a few clearings to illuminate the surface of the water.

Photographs: Night, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Blue Alley

August 11, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A side alley in San Francisco, illuminated at night by blue lights

Sometimes I think about why I am attracted to certain subjects, and I’ve thought a bit about what it is about night photography that draws me. It is actually a bit complicated, so I won’t try to explicate the whole thing here. I can, however, say something about two related issues. First, a lot of night photography is as much about what the camera sees as it is about what I see. Our human vision can work rather well in near darkness, especially once we adapt, but what we see is nothing much like what our cameras see. The camera can blur motion with long exposures, can record with relative accuracy colors that we either cannot really see in near darkness or which our minds tell us are not what they really are, and quite simply the camera can sometimes produce a photograph of things that are too dark to really see. Secondly, because of these things, the concept of objective accuracy in night photography pretty much goes right out the window. How in the world do you make an “accurate” photograph of something that you cannot actually see without the camera?

If you or I saw this scene with our eyes, we would likely be almost completely unaware of the wildly divergent colors of the light. Our vision system (eyes and, especially, brain) often tell us that we are seeing what we believe we should see. Sidewalks are grey, not blue, so even in blue light the mind registers the objectively blue sidewalk as gray. Yet the camera is more objective, and when we see photographs of these subjects we are often struck by the wild colors. I have heard people ask how to “correct” these colors. My answer? Don’t! I look for and use these intensely colored lighting sources – here a blue light, sometimes the red of automobile tail lights, the warm color of tungsten light, the daylight-like color of LED lighting, the strange spectrum of fluorescent — all of which can lend string color to scenes that are often drab and nondescript in daylight

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: light

Forest Edge, Mountain Slopes, Evening

Pine Trees, Morning

Fog, Water, Light

Blue Alley

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