Tag Archives: national

Ledge With Fallen Rocks

September 10, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Red cliffs and rocks on a ledge at Park Avenue, Arches National Park.

I made this photograph fairly early in the morning at the Park Avenue area of Arches National Park. While morning might was hitting the walls behind my camera position, the walls in front of me were still in fairly deep shade. However, as the sun rose, its light began to come over the tops of these tall sandstone walls and spill down into the canyon. As the morning wore on, the light/shadow line began to move back closer to this wall, first illuminating the ledge and the fallen rocks in holds and then beginning to highlight edges of some of the cracks in the wall itself.

The Park Avenue area seems like one of the most accessible areas of this park being only a short distance inside the park boundaries and being very close to the roadway. The area is essentially a canyon between two nearly parallel walls of sandstone, often topped with remarkable towers and other features as the canyon descends toward where it opens up into sage brush country below. At this particular hour of this particular morning, as wonderful as that scene was, the light shooting down the canyon was only so-so, so I looked around, put on a long lens, and photographed smaller vignettes of the landscape such as this one.

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: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: San Francisco

Muir Beach Overlook, Sutro Tower, Dusk

September 7, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

San Francisco’s Sutro Tower is visible in the distance beyond the Muir Beach Overlook in dusk light, in the Marin Headlands.

A few moments before making this photograph, I had decided that I was done for the evening, as the light was fading very fast and the brilliant and intense sunset and post-sunset colors were draining from the scene. But a turn or two up the road I came upon this overlook, with its view traversing the steep headlands toward the south to where the low hills of San Francisco just outside the Golden Gate were visible, Sutro Tower stood high above these hills, and subtle shades of blue and rose light were still visible.

So we pulled over, and I quickly got set up – again! – and made a few exposures in this dying light. This light is just about as subtle and difficult to photograph as it gets. In fact, I almost didn’t bother! On the scene, it was quite dark – darker than this rendition would suggest. And in that darker dusk, the haze that here partially conceals the San Francisco hills made them almost invisible.

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

Plants, Granite, Morning Light

August 31, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A few sparse plants grow in thin cracks in granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

Portions of the Sierra high country in Yosemite have been heavily glaciated. The evidence is widespread and familiar in all of its variations: domes, U-shaped canyons, remnant glacial ice-fields and a few vestigial glaciers, glacial erratics everywhere, a terrain crossed with the remains of lateral, medial, and terminal moraines. And it places, such as this area along Tioga Pass Road, there are huge expanses of granite slabs, sloping and rounded nearly solid rock broken by cracks and dikes and surrounded by the debris of gradual erosion.

Lots of things managed to live on and in these slabs. The tiniest cracks collect sand, then dust and gravel, and soon small plants spring up and even wildflowers. In some places – including the more distant ridge in this photograph – large trees manage to sustain themselves by growing entirely in these cracks. In this photograph I juxtaposed the nearby small plants crowing in a couple of shallow cracks with the receding sequence of rolling dome-like ridges with shattered rock and a few trees, some of which catch the early morning sun, with details softened by the (perhaps unusual, for landscape photography) use of a small aperture to minimize depth of field.

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

Fog and Blue Sky, Drakes Bay

August 29, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Fog intrudes on blue sky over Drakes Bay, Point Reyes National Seashore.

One more “minimal seascape” from my mid-August visit to Point Reyes National Seashore – a short visit of mostly an afternoon, on which I headed to Limantour looking for sun along the coast. That’s not quite what I found – but you can never be sure what the weather will do along this section of the Pacific coastline. Descending on the final bit of road to the beach, it was apparent that I was going to be dealing with fog. This photograph is looking more or less southwest, but straight to the west and to the northwest things were already completely socked in. After making this photograph I finished the drive to Limantour and then took a walk out toward some of the nearby estuaries – and that entire walk was under fog and in cold wind.

I have been doing a series of minimal seascape photographs for some time now, making a few more images of this type whenever I happen to be near the coast and conditions are right. These photographs are a bit trickier than they might appear. It almost looks like I could just point that camera out toward the ocean and make them – and, in fact, when I started this it almost seemed like it might be that easy. Before long I figured out that if I worked that way I would end up with… photos that looked like I just pointed the camera out toward the ocean. So I look for scenes, usually involving some sort of clouds, fog, or mist and often some interesting lighting that seem to create, for the most part, nice stable images that may have a bit more going on in them if you have time to look closely, and which also usually might evoke some sense of the calm and stability of the sea. Here I was mostly interested in the clouds, but I decided to anchor the sky to just a thin strip of water, darker blue but also partly obscured by the lower edge of the fog bank. I aimed toward a boundary area between the blue sky and the thicker fog, and captured an area of transition where both sky and fog are in play. Believe it or not, there was a fair amount of work to be done in post, including getting the right amounts of contrast and pushing the brightest parts of the clouds just far enough to create a feeling of light, but not so far as to look fake.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: national

Ledge With Fallen Rocks

Muir Beach Overlook, Sutro Tower, Dusk

Plants, Granite, Morning Light

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