Tag Archives: monochrome

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley

White Mountains, Autumn Storm

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White Mountains, Autumn Storm
An autumn storm drops snow on the summit of the White Mountains.

White Mountains, Autumn Storm. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An autumn storm drops snow on the summit of the White Mountains.

Autumn is fascinating time of transition in the Sierra Nevada. One day it can be sunny a warm, with the landscape filled with the golden and brown tones of fall — perhaps the most inviting form of the Sierra landscape. The next day something resembling winter sweeps in, the wind rises and the skies turn gray, and snow falls among the peaks. While summer is the time of easy access to most of the range, I’ve always had a great fondness for autumn in the Sierra — it is, without a doubt, my favorite time of year there.

We had ascended high on the giant fan at the base of the range above Bishop, looking for new perspectives and for aspen groves a bit more off the beaten track. The previous day and night had brought an early weather front through the range, closing some of the passes, and laying down a few inches of snow on the highest regions. From our position we looked back across foothill formations and the Owens Valley toward the immense White Mountains, a range that is just as high as the Sierra, where new snow coated the cloud-covered peaks.

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: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Branches

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Aspen Branches
Winding branches of an aspen tree, Sierra Nevada.

Aspen Branches. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Winding branches of an aspen tree, Sierra Nevada.

For some reason this tree sticks in my memory. I had been scouting and photographing in the Lake Tahoe area as part of the work on my fall color book. On my way back to the San Francisco Bay Area I decided to leave the Tahoe area and head south so that I could drive through Hope Valley and over Carson Pass. By the time I got here it was late and the light was fading. There was a solid wall of aspen leaves behind this exposed tree, but they were very early in the autumn transition and still mostly green. I did not seem like the typical “fall color” photograph, but I stopped and made a few exposures anyway.

Some time later I “found” this file in my archives and, unlike when I made the photograph, it somehow seemed obvious that it could be a black and white image. Sometimes I know (more or less) when I make the exposure that a photograph is going to end up in a monochromatic rendition. But I confess that I sometimes reserved judgment until I see the raw file later on… and that on some occasions a photograph that I initially conceived of as a color image only reveals its potential in black and white during the post processing phase.

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: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Autumn Aspens, Ridge and Haze

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Autumn Aspens, Ridge and Haze
Autumn aspen “color” in black and white, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

Autumn Aspens, Ridge and Haze. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn aspen “color” in black and white, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention —or at least a trigger to try something different that what I would usually be doing with a subject like this one. The subject is, of course, “fall color” from the Eastern Sierra Nevada aspens. The challenge at times on this visit to the area was the wildfire smoke was obscuring a lot of the landscape and muting and altering the colors. Late-summer and autumn wildfire smoke has long been a seasonal feature in and around the Sierra Nevada, but the situation has become much worse in recent years. The fires a larger and they last longer, with the end result being a whole lot of smoke in the air.

So, what to do? There are almost always ways to shoot around such challenges. One is to forego the large landscape and shoot more intimate subjects — perhaps focus on one grove, one tree, or even one leaf rather than on the grove in the larger landscape. Another is to embrace the smoky conditions and try to find a way to make aesthetically compelling photographs of that subject. Another option is to move to monochrome. The smoke that looks brown and ugly in color can merely look like interesting haze in black and white. Of course, this leaves us with another challenge when the subject is fall… color. But we photographed autumn in black and white in the past. We can still do that.

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: People In Landscape, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Travel

Bridgeport, Autumn Sky

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Bridgeport, Autumn Sky
Clouds from an autumn weather front build a above Bridgeport, California.

Bridgeport, Autumn Sky. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Clouds from an autumn weather front build a above Bridgeport, California.

For those who aren’t from my part of the American West, it is probably important to state up front that this is “the other Bridgeport,” the one in the dry eastern part of California. The town is located in a broad valley at the base of the Sierra Nevada, more or less northeast of Yosemite National Park. The valley is full of cattle grazing in its extensive pasture lands that somehow escaped the clutches of the historic Los Angeles water rights grabs in the eastern Sierra. In addition to cattle, the places relies a lot on campers, anglers, backpackers and other visitors to the outdoors — though in a more laid-back, old-school manner of places a bit off the beaten track. Oh, it is also known for being (at least in my experience) one of the two or three most expensive places in the state to buy gas for your vehicle.

To those of us who live in far more urbanized areas — for me, that is the San Francisco Bay Area — places like this have a bit of an appealing raw edge, a sense that they are closer to the cycles of the natural world and, to some extent, dominated by them. On a day like this one, when the clouds of a Pacific weather front fill the sky, the town itself seems quite small in relationship to the landscape that surrounds it.

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

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