Tag Archives: lush

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

Cottonwood Trees and Red Rock Cliffs

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Cottonwood Trees and Red Rock Cliffs
A small grove of tall cottonwood trees beneath a red rock cliff, Zion National Park.

Cottonwood Trees and Red Rock Cliffs. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small grove of tall cottonwood trees beneath a red rock cliff, Zion National Park.

Because Zion National Park is so popular, especially the main Zion Canyon along the Virgin River, the Park Service has instituted a shuttle system to carry visitors in and out and from place to place within the canyon. Like all such systems, it has it flaws — hard to get a seat going into the park early in the morning or late in the day leaving, hard to schlep camera equipment in and out — but on balance I think it is a good thing. I’ve been in Zion when the place was crawling with cars — cars on the roads, cars parked everywhere, cars waiting for parking spaces. The bus system improves on that, and I think the inconvenience is worth it for the most part.

We took a very early shuttle all the way up to the entrance to the narrows, the last stop on the route. My photographer instincts said, “Get there early!” These instincts are good, and there is a lot of interesting work to be done in the soft morning light. But photographing in these canyons isn’t the same as photographing, for example, in the open spaces of the Sierra or the desert. In red rock canyon country, the best light often comes later in the morning and well before sunset, when the sun is high enough to directly strike the red canyon walls and reflect that soft, warm light down into the lower reaches of the canyons. With this in mind, we took our time after photographing below the narrows, and rather than getting back on a shuttle we started walking down canyon, enjoying the variety of reflected light… and we repeated the process once again later in the day. I first saw this group of trees very early in the morning, and I made a point of coming back to them later in the day when I knew the reflected light would appear.

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: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Redwood National & State Parks

Redwood Forest Trail

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Redwood Forest Trail
A trail winds through redwood forest, past ferns and rhodendrons, Del Norte State Park.

Redwood Forest Trail. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A trail winds through redwood forest, past ferns and rhodendrons, Del Norte State Park.

As I write this post, it has been a 100+ degree day with wildfire smoke drifting across the Bay Area and mostly forcing us inside — and I know it is much worse in many other parts of California and the West. Barely more than two months ago we walked this coastal trail through redwoods on a cool June morning as fog drifted overhead and rhododendrons bloomed. How long ago that seems now! But looking forward an equal amount of time we can hope that this nasty, dry, hot summer will be behind us and, with luck, autumn rains will return.

Photographing redwood forests can be a tricky thing. Deep in the forest the light can be so low that exposures as long as a second or more a necessary. Meanwhile, even on the most still days there is always a slight bit of air motion, and the long palm fronds and hanging plans are virtually never still. And when the sun rises higher in the sky and sends a few beams of light to the forest floor, the difference between the sunlit spots and the shadows can be huge. In this photograph, in order to produce something that reflects what we see when we look around such a scene, I had to carefully control the brightness of the bits of sky at the top of the photograph and the stray beams of light along the trail… and then ensure that the dark areas were bright enough to make details visible.

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: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Redwood National & State Parks

Forest, White Trunks

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Forest, White Trunks
White trunks stand out from a background of dense vegetation, Redwood National Park.

Forest, White Trunks. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

White trunks stand out from a background of dense vegetation, Redwood National Park.

Several days ago I shared a similar photograph from this same location, a dense line of forest along a roadway in Northern California’s Redwood National Park. I noted that the previous photograph was of a location that I’m mildly obsessed with, a place where I stop every time I pass that way. And to prove it, here is a second photograph of the same subject — and, no, I’m not done yet!

Perhaps because the roadway opens the forest to the sky a bit more, unlike the towering redwood forests which block light very efficiently, these smaller trees seem to have really taken off. They form a dense and impenetrable wall of green that is really only broken by the vertical forms of the mostly-white trunks. Wandering along the edge of this forest, it almost seems like there are compositions everywhere I look.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Redwood National & State Parks

Redwood Trail, Spring Morning

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Redwood Trail, Spring Morning
Lush spring vegetation along a trail through coastal redwood forest, Northern California.

Redwood Trail, Spring Morning. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Lush spring vegetation along a trail through coastal redwood forest, Northern California.

Early one June morning this year we parked the car and strolled along a trail into a coast redwood grove that is close enough to the Pacific that you pass people hiking to the water and you encounter fog forming over the coast hills. Not all redwood forests are this moist, but here the conditions create especially lush growth, and on this morning the drifting fog softened the light and muted more distant subjects, though it still had a bit of a directional quality.

On this visit I thought a lot about the difference between what the camera records and what the eye and mind see in the redwoods. When opening files from photography in the redwoods, the colors often seem more dull than the memory. Several possible explanations exist, but I’ve long had an idea about how our visual system accommodates different kinds of lighting, essentially normalizing them in ways that aren’t captured by the camera. This time I made a point of stopping and thinking long and hard about the way the colors looked to me while walking through the forest, and I realized that our visual system’s normalization process compensates for the bluish light and tells us that the colors are warmer than they objectively are. To my mind, it is more important that a photograph express what I saw in the place than it is that it achieve some standard of objective color balance that essentially lies about what I experienced… and what you see here is true to my experience in the redwoods.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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