Tag Archives: meadow

Photographers, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: People, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

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Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light
Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light

Sierra Nevada Photographers, Golden Hour Light. Yosemite National Park, California. September 18, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Photographers Charles Cramer and Karl Kroeber working in golden hour light along the shore of a sub-alpine lake high in the Sierra Nevada back-country of Yosemite National Park.

Look! A photograph of people! :-)

I spent a week or so on the trail in the Yosemite back-country with a group of five other photographers this past September. We spent a good stretch of time in the area of some scenic lakes in the northeastern portion of the park. I was out for a week and a day, while the rest of the group spent a few additional days on the trail. Not too long after arriving at the nearby sub-alpine lake that was to be our home for several days, various members of the group started to explore the surrounding area, and on this evening we all decided to climb up the valley from “our” lake to the next higher lake along the drainage. We travelled more or less cross-country up the shallow valley of the creek between the two lakes, passing through beautiful meadows before arriving along the shore of this lake very late in the afternoon.

Once we arrived we more or less split up and focused on different portions of the lake and its surroundings. I mostly shot in one very small area where some beautiful granite boulders were embedded in the shoreline meadow, providing an interesting foreground for photographs across the lake to a nearby peak as the golden hour light arrived. At one point I noticed that my friends Charlie Cramer and Karl Kroeber were shooting nearby, so I paused from my landscape photography to pivot my camera in their direction and make a photograph of them as they worked the golden hour light.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Red Wing Blackbird, Fence Post

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Red Wing Blackbird, Fence Post
Red Wing Blackbird, Fence Post

Red Wing Blackbird, Fence Post. Calero Hills, California. April 18, 2009. © Copyright 2009 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A redwing blackbird pauses atop a fence post in front of central California oak/grassland, Calero County Park.

Photographed on the same morning as another recent shot of this same type of bird, the bright red upper wings of this redwind blackbird provide a striking contrast to its jet black body. This bird was on a fence surrounding an old manmade pond at the Calero County Park south of San Jose, California – a place that I can drive to in little more than 15 minutes, and where I have hiked extensively for a number of years. These birds often flock around this small lake on winter and early spring mornings. Here it was still overcast, though the low fog from earlier in the morning was now dispersing.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Early Snow, Buried Plants

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Early Snow, Buried Plants
Early Snow, Buried Plants

Early Snow, Buried Plants. North Lake Area, California. October 8, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An early fall Sierra Nevada snow storm buries meadow plants.

As I have written elsewhere, this year’s aspen color season got off to a rather strange start. Just as the first, high-elevation trees were starting to get their early peak color, an unusually cold series of winter-like storms swept over California and the Sierra during the first week of October. The storms dropped more than a foot of snow in some places, at a time of year when a few inches-deep dustings are more the rule. As the last storm came to an end, I crossed the Sierra via Tioga Pass literally hours after it was reopened, and headed south toward the Bishop area in the evening.

Early the next morning I drove up into the Bishop Creek drainage, encountering the first snow below 8000′. Shortly after passing the village of Aspendell I came to the junction with the gravel road to north lake. The road had not been plowed (and I later heard that it had been closed for several days) but I saw that a few other cars had headed up that way, so I pointed my all-wheel-drive vehicle that direction and drove the short, frozen road to the lower end of the lake. I parked here, loaded up my camera gear, and set off on foot.

It was cold! Before I finished a few hours later I was quite cold, which isn’t surprising since the temperature remained below freezing and I was working in snow. The storm had taken out quite a lot of the colorful aspen leaves. I photographed a few trees, but I also concentrated on other subjects such as fallen aspen leaves lying on the fresh snow. As I walked along the lake I realized that the scene really looked more like winter than like autumn, so I switched gears mentally and made some photographs of the snow that seem more like what I might shoot in the middle of winter. This photograph shows a section of the lakeside meadow that had been covered deeply enough with snow that in places only a few plants were still visible.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Autumn Foliage, Pond, Conway Summit

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Autumn Foliage, Pond, Conway Summit
Autumn Foliage, Pond, Conway Summit

Autumn Foliage, Pond, Conway Summit. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. October 16, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Afternoon sunlight strikes fall foliage surrounding a small pond in the eastern Sierra Nevada at Conway Summit.

As is perhaps obvious from the photograph, the sky was not entirely unobscured when I made this series of photographs of the large aspen groves at Conway Summit in the eastern Sierra Nevada in the middle of October. The changing light was an asset in that it had the potential to highlight elements of the scene and de-emphasize others, and that it was constantly changing. But it also meant that at some points the scene was so flat as to be uninteresting. In other words, I had to stand around a lot, waiting for the light to suddenly appear, only to go away a moment later.

I had been watching this small pond, surrounded by aspens and brush and reflecting the sky, for some time. I wanted just the right side light to illuminate the trees and brush, but to also get something to happen on the more distant rolling hills. At one point beautiful light had lit up the foreground grove… but it had left the closest brush in shadow. At other points the more distant hills picked up interesting light… while the grove remained in shadow. Here I had a few moments of slightly cloud-diffused light on the grove (though I could have wished for a bit more on the trees at right) and brush, along with a beam of light picking up one of the more distant groves and the slanting ridge line in front of it.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.

(Basic EXIF data may be available by “mousing over” large images in posts when this page is viewed on the web. Leave a comment if you want to know more.)