Tag Archives: national

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

Ocean View Trail

July 14, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Ocean View Trail traverses a grove of young trees, Muir Woods National Monument

First let me get a few preliminaries out of the way. Despite the title of this photograph, there I no “ocean view” here, and despite hiking a good distance up this trail I never saw one — perhaps due to the fog but also to never getting high enough above the valley or out of the trees. Second, and perhaps of more interest to some who use Canon equipment, I had a chance to work with the new Canon EF 16-35mm f/4 L IS lens for the first time on this shoot. I’ll have more to say about that in a separate post, since I know that quite a few folks are interested in this lens. All I’ll say on that technical subject here is that I was not disappointed! (Link goes to site sponsor B&H Photography.)

The conditions on this morning were those of a typical San Francisco summer day — in other words, it was foggy! There are, at least from my point of view, significant advantages to this. It can be quite warm in Northern California this time of year, especially if you get away from the coast, so the cool coastal fog is almost always a welcome relief. The fog also softens the light, and when shooting in a forest like this one that is often quite important — brighter sunlight can send light beams to the forest floor that make for very wide dynamic range and a harsh effect. And, not insignificantly, the fog means that this photographer doesn’t have to get up quite so early to have this wonderful, soft light. This trail branches off from the very popular (absurdly popular at the wrong times on the wrong days) main trail up the valley of Redwood Creek, with its easy access to the redwood trees. The Ocean View trail climbs, steeply at times, at first through redwoods and then at times through more open vegetation. In this section all of the trees appear to be very young and packed together closely. I liked the patterns of their dense trunks and also the slight glow of light on the trail.

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

Wetlands Fog, Dawn

July 9, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Reflected in a shallow pond, the winter sun rises through morning fog over San Joaquin Valley wetlands

I’m going to take a break from the series of black and white seascapes that I have posted recently and which will soon continue, and today I’m posting a more colorful photograph from this past winter. The scene is at sunrise in the San Joaquin Valley of California back on a mid-February day when we had traveled there to photograph migratory birds. At least that was my excuse. The truth is more complex — I do love photographing the geese, cranes, herons, egrets, pelicans and more, but I also love photographing the flat landscape of this valley, especially in the beautiful, misty atmosphere of winter.

We had arrived here before dawn in near darkness, and a thick ground fog was blocking the view. As the dawn came and lightened the sky above, as is often the case in the San Joaquin, we could see the high clouds through the fog, and the fog soon began to thin and reveal the sun rising through higher clouds to the east above the Sierra Nevada. I found a spot along the west edge of this marsh where I could photograph back across its reflecting surface and straight into the morning’s first light.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Winter Sky

July 4, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening winter sky above California’s San Joaquin Valley

From that hour between late afternoon and the sometimes-fiery colors of sunset, a winter sky over the San Joaquin Valley of California, photographed on New Years Day 2014. Every so often I see a sky and what to photograph it, separated from the landscape below, and forming its own sort vaporous cloudscape.

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.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: national

Ocean View Trail

Wetlands Fog, Dawn

Winter Sky

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

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