A lone tree stands against the fractured textures of a sandstone cliff, Zion National Park, Utah.
Time for one more Zion photograph. Actually, it may not be quite the last from this April visit to that park and other beautiful areas of Utah. It almost doesn’t matter exactly where this photograph was made, since red rock and green trees can be found all over the area. Basically we were driving along a park road in the afternoon, with eyes wide open and looking about for photographic subjects, when we stopped alongside a section of the cliff that was still mostly in the shade, and in front of which beautiful trees were growing.
I liked the conjunction of the hard, reddish rock with its vertical cracks and horizontal patterns… with a single living thing, the very green tree growing up against the cliff face in the shade. Sometimes the colors of the rock can seem almost unreal. I feel a bit that way now when I look at the intense red-yellow colors in the upper right corner of the frame.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Two elephant seals spar in the surf at Point Reyes National Seashore, California.
After over a month of not exposing a single frame, I needed to go out and start shooting again this past week. (June is often a very busy time of year for me, and this June was especially challenging in a number of ways.) So, even though it is finals week at the college and I have a lot of papers to grade and loose ends to tie up, I managed to get away for a half day to photograph at Point Reyes. I went there with few specific ideas about what to shoot, instead just sort of hanging loose, enjoying whatever I could find, and making photographs as I found them. I started by taking an unplanned detour out towards Tomales Point – I was sort of killing time while waiting for the light to do the right stuff, and I thought it would be interesting to head out there and see the tule elk. After that I returned to the main road and headed out toward the Point Reyes lighthouse.
It actually was not my plan to go to the lighthouse, and didn’t even drive the last little bit of roadway to that site. Instead I took the turn towards the start of the Chimney Rock trail, with a general plan of being high up on the bluffs of this southernmost section of the Point when the good light arrived. I pulled in, at a sandwich for dinner, loaded up my camera gear, and headed out along the trail. I had a few things in mind. I know that shooting back along the steep, rocky cliffs of the Point late in the day can be dramatic, and I started by photographing there – fortunately my timing turned out to be almost exactly right, as I caught a last bit of light on the mist and haze along the shoreline before the sun moved too far north to continue to light the area. I then moved on out the end of the trail, where I just sat for a while as I waited for the early evening color to come to the light. I made a few photographs out here, stopped again along the bluffs to photograph along the point (but the best light had passed), made a few photographs back across Drakes Bay, and then started back towards a low point, protected from the wind, from which I thought I might try to photograph the Farallons right at sunset. Once I got there, the light on the islands seemed uninteresting, but I soon realized that the guttural sounds of elephant seals that I had been hearing were coming from the base of the cliff on which I was standing. I moved a bit closer to the edge – but not too close! – and was able to shoot straight down on a group of elephant seals as they alternately lay around on the beach and sparred in the shallow surf just beyond the sand.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
A few plants grow in cracks in the face of a sandstone cliff, Zion National Park, Utah.
This is most certainly not an “icon” photograph of Zion! It is essentially a nondescript little bit of high country sandstone with a few plants, photographed along the Mount Carmel highway through the park in a spot where a shadowed cliff face was washed with light reflected from another rocky face behind me and on the opposite side of a narrow section of the canyon. This softer and more diffused light filled the shadowed areas yet was warmer in color than the very early- and late-day light that can also be as soft.
I’m used to seeing these examples of desert plants that seem barely alive, consisting largely of tough and dry branches and often not having much green at all. I see such things a lot, for example, when I photograph in Death Valley or in some of the high desert areas east of the Sierra. What was new to me here was the juxtaposition of these dry country plants with the rich, warm tones of the southwest sandstone.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
An early spring snow-melt torrent flows over Impossible Tree Fall, Yosemite National Park, California.
This photograph takes me back to last year in mid-June, on the day that the Tioga Pass Road opened for the season. That was a very different year than this drought year! Back then the pass opened very late – though not the latest ever – and in mid-June there was still water, snow, and ice everywhere! One of the special treats of crossing the pass on the first day of the summer after a very wet winter is that the landscape comes alive with flowing water. Water is on the move almost everywhere. Rivers are full to their banks and beyond, waterfalls flow across almost every cliff, and there are creeks everywhere, including places that you might never have imagined they would flow when you visited later in the season.
This small cascade flows very close to Tioga Pass Road, tumbling down over boulders and a series of small benches and ledges. One of the most notable features is the single tree growing right in its path, seemingly “impossible” not only because its roots seem attached only to bare granite but also because it grows in the middle of a seasonal waterfall! I came upon the fall a bit later in the morning, when the rising sun was just barely topping the ridge above the waterfall, sending light down across the slopes and backlighting the tumbling fall.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
