Tag Archives: light

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Oak Silhouette

Image December 28, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A dormant oak tree silhouetted against glowing winter light and hzae.

As the grand alpine landscapes of the Sierra backcountry become mostly inaccessible to me in the winter, my attention inevitably turns to the low country — the Pacific coast, the inland valleys, and the oak/grassland hills not far from where I live. This photograph comes from the latter, a small county park less than a half hour from my home, a place where I have hiked for many years. There are still surprises there, though, including this tree, which I had not noticed before this hike on Christmas Eve Day.

At first glance the conditions might not have seemed to promising for photography. A period of stagnant winter air around here had produced a lot of haze — so much that there were prohibitions on fireplace use and some warning about particulate levels. But that same haze glows in a luminous fashion when the light is right, and here it mutes the background details and sets off the form of this old oak tree.

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: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Winter Haze, Dormant Oak

Image December 24, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A large oak tree backed by haze-obscured winter hills.

On a Christmas Eve when large sections of the country are freezing and dealing with blizzard conditions, it might seem almost cruel to share this Christmas Eve Day photograph from here in the San Francisco Bay Area, made on a brief hike in our local hills earlier today. In fact, I was wearing short sleeves. On the other hand, perhaps some of you would like to be distracted by a scene from a warmer, drier place?

This scene, odd as it may seem to people who aren’t from here, is typical of winter in this part of the West. The trees lose their leaves, though later than in other parts of the country, but then winter grasses begin to grow. The period from now through the next four or five months is our green season. Today the atmosphere was hazy, and the backlight made it luminous.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Green Door, Evening

Image December 16, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A weathered green door, a green wall, a sidewalk — evening light.

First, a brief description of the photography, and then another reason that I am posting it today. I made the photograph on one of my daily walks — I try to get out and cover various routes in a radius of a couple of miles or so that add up to between 3 and 5 miles on a typical day. I always carry a camera, even though I don’t take it out on most of the walks. I’ve been past this old building quite a few times, but today I saw this door for the first time, so I stopped to photograph its worn and tilting form.

The other reason this photograph is here is that it comes from what is for me a photography tradition: the process of getting up to speed on a new camera. I usually avoid upgrading cameras too frequently. There are many reasons, but one is that I depend upon knowing a camera’s interface to the point where operation is intuitive. But eventually I do get new cameras. This was the first walk with the new Fujifilm XT5, which is going to replace the (fine) XPro2 that I’ve been using since that camera was introduced. I won’t go into the technical details at this point, but so far I’m liking the camera a lot.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Nature

Levee Road, Fog, and Tree

Image December 12, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn tule fog glows in morning sun, blankets a Central Valley levee road, and obscures an old tree.

The subject here is an old Central Valley tree along a levee road on a very foggy autumn morning. You may recall that my previous photograph of a fog-obscured tree from this location was in color — thought just barely, as I wrote about in that post. Color was similarly subtle (as in “nearly absent”) in this scene, too, so I went ahead and interpreted the scene in black and white.

The quiet and moody quality of this scene, of course, comes largely from the tule fog. But that is enhanced by the way it glows in the back light from the sun, seen just above and slightly to the left of the tree. The fog is very thick here, but not very deep, and even though visibility was probably little more than 100 feet, the sunlight was able to penetrate and light up the fog.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: light

Oak Silhouette

Winter Haze, Dormant Oak

Green Door, Evening

Levee Road, Fog, and Tree

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