Tag Archives: national

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

Ross’s Geese, Tree and Marsh

December 20, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A thick flock of Ross’s geese flies above a marsh and a solitary tree in California’s Central Valley

After a full morning (and then some!) of photographing mostly Ross’s geese at a Central Valley wildlife refuge, we took a short break for a mid-afternoon lunch and then hurried back to the refuge by about 3:30 for evening photography. One of the last things we did before taking this break was to briefly assemble at the main overlook near the entrance to the refuge, where we were a bit surprised to see lots of geese settling in on one of the nearby ponds, and from which we could look back and see still more geese at the edges of the pasture where we had been photographing them.

As is often the case on a tule fog day like this one in the Central Valley, while the fog did “clear,” the general haziness never did completely go away. Instead the atmosphere remained mildly opaque, and it glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. Looking west, it was almost hard to see into this glow, but that is the direction we looked to see the pond and beyond it some isolated trees and the wetlands disappearing into the distance. Behind us, back on that pasture, the flock suddenly lifted off all at once and the birds made a large loop or two around us. I could see that they were likely to pass by the far edge of this pond and by the silhouetted tree, so I did a “landscape on the fly,” shooting handheld with a 100-400mm zoom as the birds came into the composition that I quickly found.

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

Trees and Red Rock, High Country

December 18, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Backlit trees in a high country terrain of rugged red rock sandstone, Zion National Park

Since this has been a recurring theme in my photographs from Zion National Park in October, I think I’ll keep the commentary a bit short on this one. I made the photograph along the Mount Carmel Highway, which passes through high country along an east-west route though the park. We had a day here while on our way to our eventual destination to the east, so we decided to focus on this high country area, with its deep washes and slot canyons, autumn colors, and rounded forms of various types of layered sandstone.

In this area the sandstone was a sort of medium red – not as intense as some of the deeper strata nor as light as some of the nearly white rocks found elsewhere. This rock was finely layered in many places, and formed into a small world of ridges and domes covered with widely spaced trees. I photographed the scene in afternoon light, when the sun was shining from behind the trees and creating a sort of halo of light for each one. Because of the backlight, a bit of atmospheric haze is present and the underlying rocks take on a deeper tone. Every so often a friend of fellow photographer might refer to something they call “G Dan light,” and this is it – the light of backlit trees, photographed by shooting almost directly into the sun, with just a bit of haze.

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

Geese and Sun in Fog

December 17, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small flock of Ross’s geese passes by the sun as it barely shines through dense Central Valley tule fog

Although photographing birds and the landscapes where they are found on a dense fog day might seem like a challenge or perhaps even a disappointment, for me it turns out that the fog makes things much more interesting. While I love seeing and photographing the migratory birds as the warm dawn light hits them, that is usually over fairly quickly. But with fog there are all kinds of interesting mysteries to explore. Birds appear on the edge of visibility, and often you may hear them but not see them. (This was especially true with sandhill cranes on this day. We often heard them, but never caught more than a faint and momentary visual sighting as they briefly emerged partially from the fog as they flew directly overhead.) The atmosphere can glow as the sun tries to push through the shallow tule fog.

At one point during this foggy morning a breeze came up and for a moment it looked like the fog might clear. It became a bit less opaque near the ground and there were occasional hints of potential light as the fog momentarily thinned. The disk of the sun became faintly visible, though it often quickly faded again from sight. When I first saw the sun I thought that since birds were flying overhead from time to time that if I was patient I just might be able to get a photograph of some of them in the fog with the faint sun behind them. You can only “plan” a photograph like this in the most general sense: the amount of fog, its thickening and thinning, and the appearance and formation of the birds are entirely out of the photographer’s control. So I wait and watch… and make a number of photographs.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Zion High Country, Evening

December 16, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

High country of Zion National Park in evening light

As an official member of the I Love Backlit Trees club, I’m more or less unable to resist shooting straight toward the sun near the start of end of the day to capture the light illuminating the fringes of trees from behind. Yes, it is a repeating subject of mine… The high country of Zion National Park along the Mount Carmel Highway is a great place to find such light if you are observant and think about where and when to look. Especially late in the day – but not quite all the way to sunset – the light slants across ridges and hills and picks off the trees, which here are separated enough to allow the light to catch whole trees. (This is a bit harder to find among the denser forests of my Sierra Nevada.)

This sort of shooting provides some challenges. One, of course, is the potential for a very wide dynamic range between the brightly lit leaves and needles of the trees and the shaded areas that may be behind and around them. Although the camera’s metering system may not show it, the sunlit portions of the trees are often extremely bright and can easily blow out completely – and the solution is to expose less… which diminishes the light in the shadows. Several solutions are possible. Here I made a single exposure with the brightest areas just at the limit of exposure, and if I had opened up more or lengthened the exposure the fringes of the trees would likely have gone all the way to pure white. (You can allow this to happen with a few specular highlights without much of a problem, but don’t over-do it!) With the single-exposure approach, I find that the shadow fader in ACR is my friend! It does a fine job of bringing back a bit of the detail in the darker areas that might otherwise be lost. Although I didn’t employ them in this photograph, there are some other approaches that can also work. One is to use exposure bracketing – making two or more images at different exposures, usually one for the shadows and one for the highlights, which are then manually combined in post by means of layer masks. This is labor intensive but can produce very wonderful results.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: national

Ross’s Geese, Tree and Marsh

Trees and Red Rock, High Country

Geese and Sun in Fog

Zion High Country, Evening

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