Tag Archives: morning

Urban Canyon, Maiden Lane

August 26, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Morning light strikes buildings above the curving urban canyon of Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan.

We were in this area of lower Manhattan for several reasons on the morning of the last full day of our New York City visit. We made a stop at the nearby World Trade Center site – it is difficult to explain all of the reactions that I had to this. The last time I visited (close to New Years Day 2000) we stood on top of one of the buildings to see the nighttime view – and now there is a void in that place.

We were also there to visit our oldest son who was working that day in an office on Maiden Lane – and, later on, to join the throngs walking out onto the Brooklyn Bridge. (This was our first day of clear, blue sky weather.) I made this photograph as we approached that street a bit early, giving us some time to look around a bit. Oddly, when I visit the very narrow and twisty “canyons” of this part of Manhattan, with the very tall buildings towering immediately above and following the curves of the old streets, I always think of different sorts of canyons, for example the sort that I frequently visit in the Sierra. It occurred to me that the same light falls on both types of canyons. You can bet that I would have my camera out if light like that shining on the front of these curved buildings appeared in “my” Sierra!

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, Photographs: Yosemite

Lodgepole Forest, First Light

August 17, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First morning light touches the tops of lodgepole pines in a lakeside forest, Yosemite National Park, California.

This bit of dense lodgepole pine forest is on the far shore of an easily-visited lake along Tioga Pass Road, and I like to photograph it when the morning light is just starting to make its way over the tops of the surrounding mountains and it begins to touch the first trees along the lake shore.

This photograph is 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, Photographs: Yosemite

Trees and Granite Slabs

August 15, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trees growing in granite slabs in the Yosemite high country stand in morning light.

Scenes like this are, for me, among those that most strongly characterize the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and specifically the portion of the range found in Yosemite National Park. There are many mountain ranges that have their own attractions, but the combination of large swaths of glacially formed and polished granite with open forests filled with light immediately shouts “Sierra Nevada” to me. I used to be attracted most to the highest alpine peaks, but more and more I like the more intimate landscapes of the parts of the Sierra in which small ponds and tarns are placed among little meadows separated by trees and bits of granite.

Scenes like this one are not, frankly, all that hard to find in Yosemite and elsewhere in the Sierra. I photographed these trees and boulders in this expanse of glaciated granite near Olmsted Point in the early morning when the light was still warm and the shadows long.

This photograph is 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: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Mono Lake Shoreline and Tufa, Dawn

August 9, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dawn illuminates the shoreline of Mono Lake, tufa towers, and the smooth surface of the lake.

In my previous post (“Abandoned Buildings, Eastern Sierra”) I wrote about not quite making it to the South Tufa area of Mono Lake at dawn, instead stopped five or ten minutes earlier to shoot some amazing red sunrise light on the eastern Sierra escarpment in the Parker Pass area. Fortunately, because Mono Lake is lower in elevation that the spot where I shot sunrise, by the time I got to South Tufa the sunset wasn’t that far along. In fact, by rushing out to the shoreline I managed to get there shortly after the first light hit the tufa towers.

This was one of the first photographs I made when I arrived, hence the very golden “first light” and the long shadows on the shoreline rocks in the foreground. It was an interesting morning: there were already plentiful signs that this would be a day of thunderstorms and rain with virga to the east and a developing weather cell already over the Sierra crest to the north. Despite all of the potential for “weather action,” it was very quite and still at this point, with only the sound of seagulls breaking the morning silence.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.