Morning light strikes a tree in a small grove of trees surrounded by Sierra Nevada granite boulders, Yosemite National Park.
This is really a very unremarkable scene in most ways. The foreground tree, with its top leaning over to the right, sits in a mixed forest/meadow area behind some rocks that look like the remains of an old glacial moraine. (This area was largely formed by glaciers, and their evidence is everywhere here.) Beyond the moraine and out of sight from this position is a good-size subalpine lake, and above that rocky, talus-covered slopes lead upwards to much higher alpine ridges and peaks.
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
Early evening light slants across the rocky shoreline of a sub-alpine back-country lake, Yosemite National Park.
Late in the afternoon on this mid-September day, when the calendar says summer but the surroundings say autumn, we walked cross-country from the lake where we were camped up to the next higher lake in the drainage, following the stream through forest and then sub-alpine meadows to arrive at the outlet of the higher lake in the early evening light. This has been a somewhat unusual year in the Sierra, with late and heavier than normal snowfall, and cool temperatures that maintained the snowpack late into the season, and there were still patches of snow all the way down to the lake’s rocky shoreline. (For scale, if you look really close near the lower right “corner” of the large snow field, you might be able to make out a small spot that is one of my fellow photographers. Hi, Mike!)
I worked this little shoreline clump of rocks to death – I started here shortly after we arrived, and I continued to shoot in more or less this spot until the light faded to the point that we had to start our return hike in order to get back to camp before it was completely dark. This specific spot had a lot to offer, not all of which is visible in this photograph. Along the near shore at my feet there was a little bit of shoreline meadow with grasses, heather, and a few blooming plants and interrupted by these light-colored granite rocks and slabs set at odd angles. Beyond was the water of the lake, transparent and shallow enough that some underwater rocks were visible, and also reflecting the snow, talus fields, and ridges on the far side. I especially like the quality of light at this subtle interval between the “normal” daytime light and the very warm-colored light that comes a bit later. Here the light begins to soften a bit and the color warms slightly, but not so much that the colors are obvious.
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
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
