Tag Archives: national

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

July 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Motion blur abstraction of a winter scene with three birds landing

Near the end of the day, well along into the dusk hour, with light fading fast, I decided to take advantage of the poor light and “play” a bit with very slow shutter speeds and intentional camera motion. By moving the camera in various ways during the exposure I can control to some extent the angle, length, and linearity of the blur. In some cases it is enough to just track the birds — and give the less fuzzy image of the three central birds, I am pretty certain that is what I was doing here. In other cases I can basically ignore the motion of my subjects and simply think about how to move the camera to create patterns in the motion blur.

I’ve often felt that working for sharply focused, stopped motion images of birds is not the only way to depict whatever it is that attracts me to them. The camera lets us see birds in ways that we really cannot usually see them with our own eyes. When birds are in motion it is almost impossible — at least with many types of birds — to clearly see them. They move too fast and the motion of wings is essentially impossible to track visually. And when we do stop them with a fast shutter speed, while we get to see them with a kind of clarity that isn’t otherwise possible, we may also sacrifice that sense of constant motion. So I started playing with the idea of intentionally avoiding sharp focus, allowing camera motion to come into play and using slow shutter speeds to allow the birds to blur and to blur their surroundings as the camera moves. To me, this sometimes evokes more strongly the feeling of the fast motion that I observe among these birds, and creates a different sort of honest portrayal of them.

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: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Ross’s Geese, Marsh, Evening Light

July 1, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A large flock of Ross’s geese, some airborne, in a San Joaquin Valley marsh, winter

Six months ago it was New Year’s Day 2014, and I was in the San Joaquin Valley with friends, joining a joyous and raucous throng of migratory birds at a party welcoming the new year. Today, at the opposite point on our annual journey around the sun, it is very hot and dry here in California, and thoughts of this January day were hardly on my mind until I started to revisit some photographs from earlier this year — and was reminded that we are now halfway back through the year on our way to another New Year’s Day.

In the evening these geese were more or less settled into the marshland at this San Joaquin Valley location, with small groups coming and going. I’m certain it was cold, and the cries of the birds filled that air, and the surface of the marsh reflected evening clouds as the day came to an end.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Ridgeline, Trees, Winter Fog

June 19, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A winter fog obscures trees along a ridgeline high above Yosemite Valley

It may be surprising to hear that this is a color photograph. Well, the camera thought so, but you cannot easily tell by looking at the image. I was shooting another nearby subject, or perhaps waiting for that subject to some light that would make it more “photographable,” when I looked up to see this fog enveloping the high tree-covered ridges above this part of Yosemite Valley, with the atmosphere gently glowing in the backlight.

The photograph is a reminder for me that it is often better to see what you can make of the conditions you find than to lament that the conditions are not what you hoped for. (OK, you can go ahead a lament a little bit—i think that is normal!) While I often go to a place perhaps expecting or hoping for particular conditions, I’ve learned that quite often the most interesting opportunities are not those that we can predict but those that surprise us or those that we find. If the atmosphere of the place, apart from your initial notions of how it might be photographed, is something that attracts you, then it must be possible to make some kind of effective photograph of that thing that you like. You might be hoping for colorful sunset light, but you know—or at least I hope you do!—that a foggy evening, or a rainy evening, or even a hazy evening of soft light can be a wonderful thing, too.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Plants, Canyon Wall

June 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Plants grow from thin cracks in the rock wall of a desert canyon, Death Valley National Park

I found this little scene in a well-known Death Valley Canyon, where the walls become vertical, hundreds of feet high, and quite close together. Canyons like this are some strange combination of beautiful — with soft light, colorful rock, shade — and harsh — with the clear evidence of flooding that periodically sweeps through and rearranges everything, against a backdrop of more typical aridity, and a terrain almost entirely consisting of rock.

In these places I am always intrigued by where and how plant life manages to survive. This is nowhere more true than in such canyons in Death Valley National Park, where the usual challenges are made worse by extreme heat and dryness. Here two kinds of plants have managed to find a foothold, but in must be a very tenuous one. The grow from thin cracks in solid rock, a good distance above whatever water comes during the periodic flooding of the wash, in an environment in which the light is most often muted yet in which extreme temperatures are common for much of the year.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: national

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

Ross’s Geese, Marsh, Evening Light

Ridgeline, Trees, Winter Fog

Plants, Canyon Wall

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