Tag Archives: mount

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Point Reyes and Drakes Bay

July 1, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Drakes Bay and the Point Reyes Peninsula, viewed from near Mount Vision on Inverness Ridge

After photographing very early in the morning along the shores of Tomales Bay near the town of Inverness, I continued along the road to Point Reyes and soon entered the national seashore. There was a possibility that I might try to meet up with a group of people who planned to photograph the herds of tule elk a bit later in the morning, but at this point I had some time to kill before that might occur. I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to shoot, so I was sort of “following my nose” and the light, atmosphere, and other conditions and waiting to see where I might end up. I had a general idea that it might be interesting to go all the way out to the point itself, where the morning light might illuminate some of the cliffs along Drakes Bay that don’t get that sort of light later in the day.

However, long before I got close to that area I passed a turn-off that I had often noticed and wondered about, a road labelled Mount Vision. With one option looking just about as good as any other option, I decided to head up that road to see what I could see. The road climbs quickly, more or less switchbacking up a steep include and up a few valleys before more or less leveling off high up on Inverness Ridge, actually ascending to the top of the ridge in a few spots and providing panoramic views both towards the ocean and back towards Tomales Bay. Although it wasn’t exactly foggy – at least not in the form that is common here much of the year – the atmosphere was obscured and out at the far end of the peninsula the curving end of Point Reyes was a bit hard to see, and there was a distinct blue quality to the haze that didn’t seem like it was going to work especially well for a color photograph. So I started thinking that this scene might work better in black and white. Soon I saw this steep foreground ridge with its tall trees and dark shaded elements and it seemed like its angle and darker tones might set off the lighter and less contrasty elements of the landscape in the distance, from the tree-filled valley in the middle of the frame to the barely visible peninsula near the horizon.

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: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Plants in Sandstone Cliff

June 6, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Plants grow in cracks in a sandstone cliff in the Zion National Park high country

For some reason, the small area where this cliff is found – along the Mount Carmel Highway – holds some fascination for me, and I have stopped here to photograph quite a few times. (This despite the fact that there is no good place to pull over!) In close proximity there are a small stream bed, some beautiful trees growing near the cliff, a section of much more fractured rock, and this cliff of clean, straight rock cut by vertical cracks and crossed by the diagonal lines formed by the texture of the sandstone.

In different light this section of the cliff can be a lot more red, but here I photographed it in shaded light and the tones shifted significantly towards blue. The small plants seem to survive quite well growing it what seems like an impossible location, and when I made the photograph the one on the right was just beginning to take on fall colors. A closer view reveals that the rock’s surface is covered with a wide variety of types of lichen, much of it a bit too small to make out in this web-sized photograph.

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Fog and Forested Ridges

May 9, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter fog envelops forested ridges near Mount Tamalpais on the Pacific coast north of San Francisco

I photographed this scene on an early February day when the atmosphere was especially murky north of San Francisco. I had traveled this way for the day with some very general ideas about photographic subjects, but once I got “there” quite a few of those ideas looked a lot less promising. I had initially thought about photographing inside the coastal redwood forest, but when I arrived at my intended location I found that everything was gray, gray, gray! The atmosphere was hazy and murky and high clouds blocked any interesting light from the sun. So figured I might try for something moody along the coast, but there I found the same very difficult light.

I finally headed back up into the Marin hills, hoping that I might get up above the thickest of the gray and possibly get some light filtered through the high clouds and perhaps some longer views. As I entered the Mount Tamalpais State Park and started to ascend the road toward the peak, I finally came out of the coastal fog – though the overhead clouds remained. As I went up this road I looked for spots with some sort of longer view of the fog bank from which I had just emerged, and I finally found it along a bend where the road passed an area of open meadows and rolling hills. Here there was a line of sight back toward the ocean – completely obscured by fog – and the bits of lower hills that were poking through the tops of the clouds. On a technical note, this is not a monochrome or black and white photograph. It is, however, somewhat desaturated. One of the side effects of this difficult atmosphere was a very blue quality to the light that became much more apparent in the photograph than it appeared to a viewer on the scene. I knew I would have to deal with this in post in order to get an effect that seemed appropriate and believable. My initial thinking was to actually make it a black and white photograph, but as I worked with the image I came to feel that it worked better if some degree of muted color was retained.

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Forest Ridge, Fog

February 18, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Ocean fog overruns forest-covered ridges in Marin County, California

I made this photograph on a very cold, cloudy, gray, and by most people’s standards, fairly miserable day! It was a morning of murky atmosphere, high clouds blocking the light, and thick ocean fog along the coast and into the coastal forests – and it had stymied most of my attempts to find the sorts of photographs I was looking for. I finally decided to just look around – we call this “scouting” – and I eventually ended up in the hills near Mount Tamalpais State Park in Marin County, where I thought I might get above this gray atmosphere. I sort of succeeded, rising above the coastal fog, but the overall haziness and the high clouds were still a factor.

As I drove up the ridge and past an area of open meadows, the view opened back down towards lower hills with fog swirling round them. The hills were mostly submerged in the fog, but in one area the tops of ridges managed to poke through, though at times they, too, were covered. This is one of a small set of photographs I made here before moving on. In order to get the mood that I wanted to evoke from this subject, I made several particular choices in post production. One was to desaturate the colors quite a bit but to not go all the way to a purely black and white rendition, so the dark areas retain the slightly blue-green coloration of the forest. I also did some work with curves to produce the balance of light and dark that I was looking for.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: mount

Point Reyes and Drakes Bay

Plants in Sandstone Cliff

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