Tag Archives: north america

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Breakwater, San Francisco Bay

August 19, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Anchored ship and ship yard cranes of the port of Oakland beyond a breakwater, San Francisco Bay.

I made this photograph on one of my summertime San Francisco visits on which I head up there on the train very early in the morning, and then I walk wherever my nose leads me, making photographs. On this visit I left the train station and ended up crossing a bridge to the inlet behind AT&T park, sometimes called “McCovey Cove.” From along the far side of this inlet I could see across the San Francisco Bay to the towering cranes at the port of Oakland. They were backed by a fog bank that completely obscured the city of Oakland and all but the very tops of the East Bay Hills.

This morning light coming across the Bay can be very special. As it often shines through the moisture laden air over the water and sometimes through clearing fog, it can take on a luminous glow and can even be almost too bright to look at. This was that sort of morning, so I let the sky exposure go as close to white as I could and still retain some sense of the thick air. The dark object at the left is a concrete breakwater outside the entrance to South Beach Harbor.

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

Greenstone Lake, Morning

August 18, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early morning light on Greenstone Lake and surrounding trees and rocky terrain.

Greenstone is a relatively small lake just beyond the upper end of Saddlebag Lake, which is itself located just east of the Sierra crest and Yosemite National Park in an area dominated by Mount Conness and the tall ridge on which it stands. I had arrived before dawn at the Saddlebag Lake parking lot so that I could be on the trail before sunrise. Rather than giving in to the temptation to pay for a “water taxi” ride to the other end of the lake, I took the trail along the left shore, and arrived at Greenstone Lake just about the time that the first direct light was making its way down to this lake and the surrounding rocky hillside.

In this wet year with its late arrival of summer conditions, everything was still very wet around the lake and the meadow plants were still green and growing. (In dry years they start to finish up their growth spurt and begin turning brown by this time.)

I think this lake is a bit tricky to photograph in morning light. The light could be lovely at sunrise, but it would still be well up on the high ridges above the lake. It takes a long time for the sun to get high enough to rise above the ridge leading to Tioga Peak, and by that time most of the early morning warm light quality has given way to more typical daytime light. There were a few challenges in this photograph. They included trying to figure out how to find a workable composition in such a complex scene that was made even more complex by the reflections in the water. I think the triangle of rocky terrain in the upper half of the frame may help with this. The light posed several problems, mainly related to the very large dynamic range between the bright rocks and the shaded areas of forest at upper right. The light color was also tricky – because the shadows tend to be much bluer in a photograph than your eyes register when you are there, I had to mute the very blue quality of the shadows. This was done partly with an overall adjustment to color, but some additional work had to be done directly on the shadows.

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

Flooded Meadow Near Greenstone Lake

August 17, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Late-season snow fields are reflected in the pond of a flooded alpine meadow near Greenstone Lake, Sierra Nevada.

During this year of heavy and late winter snowfall, there is still a surprising amount of snow in the Sierra Nevada high country. In the upper portion of this image you can see large snow fields (with much larger ones higher on the slope and out of the frame) at that base of this talus slope at around 10,000+ feet of elevation. During a more typical year, there would still be a few scattered snow fields, but nothing like we see this year. And because there is still so much snow, the plants that would normally be well-developed by now are still just emerging, and the creeks and ponds are overflowing, the meadows are flooded… and the mosquitos are having a field day!

This little pond among the boulder-filled meadows near Greenstone Lake at the far end of Saddlebag Lake was still overflowing with snowmelt water that reflected the extensive snow fields still on the talus field beyond. To get to this spot – in mid-August! – I had to cross a number of still frozen snow fields, follow trails that were flooded in places, and pick my way carefully across waterlogged meadows. It is going to be a short summer season in the high Sierra, but as a compensatory bonus we may still see wildflowers all the way into September.

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

Eastern Sierra Nevada Near June Lake

August 16, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trees ascend sage-covered hills toward the Sierra Nevada crest near June Lake, California.

Near highway 395 in Mono County, the main north-south route east of the Sierra crest, these open stands of large conifers ascend from the high desert sagebrush country towards the peaks of the Sierra crest, which rise much more abruptly on this side of the range than on the gentle west side. The tall ridge is above the June Lakes resort area between Mammoth Lakes and Lee Vining.

While my primary goal on this trip was to photograph in the Yosemite high country along Tioga Pass Road, smoke from a wildfire near Glacier Point in the park was drifting over the Tuolumne area and creating a lot of very non-photogenic haze. I had a hunch that by dropped over to the east side of the range I might be able to get away from the smoke or at least find areas where it wasn’t so thick. The smoke was still affecting the light near Lee Vining, but I didn’t have to drive too far south to get out of its path, though even here there is a bit of haze increasing the effect of atmospheric recession.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: north america

Breakwater, San Francisco Bay

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Greenstone Lake, Morning

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Flooded Meadow Near Greenstone Lake

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Eastern Sierra Nevada Near June Lake

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

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