Just a quick update. I’ve been in Death Valley for the past five days, photographing this, that, and the other thing. I left Eureka Valley Dunes at about 9:00 a.m. this morning, and I’ve made it as far as Bishop, California. Where they have espresso. Did I mention the espresso? :-)
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.
New spring dogwood leaves after morning rain along Crane Flat Road, Yosemite National Park.
There is a grove of dogwood trees along highway 120 into Yosemite, between the park entrance and the valley, where I stop several times each seasons. Most recently I stopped there on a quiet autumn evening this past October when the dogwood leaves were turning fall colors. Much earlier in the season I stop to see and photograph the dogwood flowers. I made this photograph several years ago on my first visit to the grove that season, on a rainy morning when the leaves had emerged and the flowers were in bloom.
While the flowers were the main reason I visited the grove on this morning, it turned out that the flower photographs were less interesting, in some ways, than the photographs I made of the leaves of the dogwood trees and of other newly sprouted plants. Not only where the plants young and fresh and green, but the soft light and the drops of water from the light rain intensified the colors and made the light less harsh.
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
Yosemite Valley, New Snow, Morning - Classic winter view of snow-covered Yosemite Valley scene photographed from Wawona Tunnel View after a late-winter storm.
It has been a bit of a tradition to post a photograph of Yosemite Valley in snow on Christmas Day – it seems like the Sierra way to send seasons greetings! I hope that you and yours are having a wonderful holiday!
(The photograph was made on the morning after a late-winter snow storm in The Valley back in 2006.)
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
Morning light strikes a tree in a small grove of trees surrounded by Sierra Nevada granite boulders, Yosemite National Park.
This is really a very unremarkable scene in most ways. The foreground tree, with its top leaning over to the right, sits in a mixed forest/meadow area behind some rocks that look like the remains of an old glacial moraine. (This area was largely formed by glaciers, and their evidence is everywhere here.) Beyond the moraine and out of sight from this position is a good-size subalpine lake, and above that rocky, talus-covered slopes lead upwards to much higher alpine ridges and peaks.
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
