Shoreline fences along the edge of the San Francisco Bay with moored boats and, in the distance, the Oakland shoreline and East Bay hills.
This photograph was made from a spot that many San Francisco Giants fans know rather well – the Third Street Bridge that is right next to AT&T Park. There were few Giants fans around when I made this photograph though, since it was quite early in he morning on a weekday. The camera is pointing almost but not quite directly into the early morning sun, which shines through a luminous morning haze over the bay on a very still morning.
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 nearby sandstone tower backed by a more distant cliff face in morning light, Zion National Park.
If you look at the photograph that I posted yesterday, you can probably locate almost the entire composition of this photograph contained within the earlier one. This perhaps illustrates one or more things about how I sometimes think when making photographs. One approach that I think I use quite a bit is to try to isolate small sections within much larger landscapes. If you look at yesterday’s image, you’ll see that it uses a fairly familiar sort of approach, namely to include a fairly large swath of “stuff” from close to far away within the frame. Today’s image, though, eliminates out all of that other stuff that might provide a wider context and instead just “shows” one small, interesting bit of the larger scene. And, obviously, I used a longer lens – something else that I often do when shooting landscape. I’m most certainly not one of those photographers who buys into the notion that “landscape photography is done with wide-angle lenses!” I also like juxtapositions. In this scene there are perhaps quite a few – and you might even see some that I’m unaware of. There are color juxtapositions the bright green at the bottom against the very different tones of the rocks; the brighter reddish rocks in the foreground against the darker and more blue or even purple tones of the more distant rocks; the clarity of the close and sunlit red rocks against the lower contrast and somewhat haze-obstructed character of the distant cliff.
The location is in the Virgin River drainage of Zion Canyon. One person described it as “Yosemite in red,” and now that I have been there I can certainly see why! While the overall scale of this valley is smaller than that of Yosemite, the verticality of the place is just as stunning. In fact, in some ways, because the walls are closer and because of the wild colors, it may be more stunning. (Of course, Yosemite does have those waterfalls… and some crazy dome formations… and the massive scale of features like El Capitan. I digress… ;-) The smaller scale makes some kinds of photography perhaps a bit easier. For example, those “juxtapositions” I mentioned above can be fine tune a bit more readily by moving the camera position a few feet. (I did that here as I moved the camera a bit to get three trees way up on the far cliff to line up to the left of the upper section of the closer formation on the right side of the frame. Ironically, you probably didn’t even see them until I mentioned that… ;-)
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
Morning light silhouettes towers and ridges, Arches National Park, Utah.
On my last morning at Arches National Park in early April, I made one final quick trip back up into the park before hitting the road back to California. I was up very early, arriving in the park before sunrise. I had a string of possible subjects in mind, all of which depended to some extent on how the morning light played out. They include the possibility of photographing the setting full moon against some arch or tower that I might be able to put in the right spot relative to the moon, a strong intention to photograph the Tower of Babel and The Organ in very early light, balanced against a desire to shoot some other arch or tower in similar light, the thought that there might be some chances to shoot details of the Park Avenue area a bit later, and as always the potential to shoot straight into the morning sun and haze – a favorite habit of mine.
After getting to a couple of these subjects, the series of receding ridges, buttes, and towers to the east seemed interesting. I used a long lens to photograph this in order to edit down the portion of the landscape that I would work with and to compress the distances. The scene was trickier than it might appear – because I was using the long lens I had very limited options to move from side to side and still keep an interesting composition. In addition it was windy – always a tricky thing when working with very long focal lengths. And, of course, I was shooting in to the light and the backlit atmospheric haze of the early morning – not that I’m complaining about that, since it is some of my favorite light. In the end, I came up with this composition which includes a bunch of features that I can’t even identify! ;-)
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 sailboat in morning light on the San Francisco Bay, San Francisco, California.
Taking a momentary break from the continuing stream of photographs from Utah, here is a photograph from San Francisco. On one of the first spring-warm days of the year, I took the train to San Francisco very early and then spent the morning wandering around with my camera and a few lenses. In many ways, this is my preferred approach to shooting in San Francisco – to travel light and walk – since there so many instantaneous and surprising subjects that come and go so quickly. This is sort of my own brand of “Photo Walk” for one.
On this morning I got of the train just after sun rise and first wandered through the China Basin area, taking time to photograph a large construction site before heading back over toward the Embarcadero to walk along the waterfront. As I walked past AT&T Park, I noticed the bright backlit and slightly hazy sky over the Bay and began to look for ways to photograph it. A moment later I found a gap in the shoreline “stuff” where I could get a clear shot of the water, and I stopped to put a longer lens on the camera. Right at that moment – lucky me! – I noticed this solitary sailboat coming into the scene from the right and by working quickly I had time to get about a half dozen shots of it against the minimalist backdrop of the bay before another boat joined it and cluttered up the image.
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
