Tag Archives: north

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Kit Fox Hills, Amargosa Range

April 22, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Amargosa Range mountains rise behind the Kit Fox Hills, Death Valley

These low, deeply eroded, and colorful (in the right light) Death Valley hills lie at the western base of the Amargosa Range near the start of the road heading north toward the Scotty’s Castle area. I recently read that they may be the remnants of an old earthquake fault along the eastern side of Death Valley, marking a division between the rising mountains and the sediment-filled valley. I have walked along the base of these hills, though I still need to find the time to more extensively explore their rugged and eroded landscape.

Late in the day they intercept almost the very last sunlight to reach the valley floor before sunset. With that in mind, I have photographed them many times, often from a good distance away across the valley. That was the case on this evening, when I found a spot elevated above the valley floor and climbed to its summit to watch the late-day light. It was one of those evenings when the light was unpredictable. There were clouds to the west above the Cottonwood mountains, which can turn out to be either a good thing or a bad thing. The clouds may light up at sunset and the minutes just after… or they may simply block the sun and “turn out the lights” on sunset photography. It looked like the latter might turn out to be the case as I watched the sun descend toward a band of thicker clouds. But there was a small gap between the base of the clouds and the top of the mountains, and the sunlight shone through this gap for a few minutes, casting beautiful soft light on these hills.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Conifer Bark

April 21, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Close-up of conifer tree bark, Yosemite Valley

I’ve spent a total of perhaps a bit more than a week-and-a-half in Yosemite so far this season, beginning back in late February when I spent an unusually cold and snowy week mostly in Yosemite Valley photographing various aspects of the winter landscape. (An artist-in-residency through the Yosemite Renaissance was an important reason for that visit.) I was back again this past week, mostly thinking that I would be experience the “spring” half of the annual winter to spring transition — but once again arriving to snowy conditions. Yet the signs of spring were everywhere, too. Annual plants are poking up, here and there one can find a few early wildflowers, the dogwoods are just starting to leaf out, and the waterfalls are running strongly.

We often think of the “landscape” as being the immense scale of things in the natural world. But the grand landscape is the sum of many small components, and landscape photography has long paid attention to them individually, too. In a place like Yosemite, with its iconic big features, you might have to remind yourself to go look for the small things. One one recent day with so-so midday light, I put on my camera pack, grabbed my tripod, and just wandered slowly off into the forest, stopping frequently to consider my surroundings. Near the farthest point on this walk, I left the trail and walked into the forest and, for no particular reason, came upon a tree that seemed not all that different from all of the surrounding trees until I looked a bit closer and saw these remarkable bark patterns.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Death Valley, Mountains, Morning

April 20, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on Death Valley and the base of the Panamint Mountain Range

A few recent photographs here have focused on the intimate landscapes of Death Vally canyons. This one leaves the canyon and moves out into the open, looking from the eastern mountains across valley to the base of the Panamint range on the other side. We had driven up in to these mountains in the morning after first photographing dawn from the valley. Here we could watch the morning light traverse the valley — in the photograph it still had not made it to the low hills below our position.

At about the time of my first visits to Death Valley I had also made my first trips to Alaska. It may seem odd, given their different climates, but it struck me that the two places have a lot in common. Most of all, in both places I experiences huge spaces and immense quiet and stillness in ways that I had not really known before. (I rarely experience this in the Sierra, even above timberline, since the distances are smaller and somewhere in the landscape there will be a tree.) In Death Vally, it is hard to make sense of the scale of the landscape. The combination of huge distances, tremendously large features, and a dearth of objects of known size conspire to confuse us. Look across flats to a barren mountain and its valleys, it might seem that you could just walk there. You could, perhaps, but it might take many days.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Steps, Red Door In Sun

April 19, 2018 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Manhattan residence building with steps and a sunlit red door

It is hard to resist a red door in morning sunlight. :-) The photograph comes from 2014, on one of our frequent visits to New York City to visit family, eat a lot of food, and do street photography. When in New York (and sometimes other boroughs including Brooklyn and Queens) we walk a lot. We’ve been known to walk into Manhattan from Brooklyn, or walk all the way up from the lower end of Manhattan to and into Central Park.

While I don’t recall the specifics of this photograph (though I think I have a general sense of where we were) I know we were out for one of those walks. I’m also pretty certain that this was more or less a quick shot as we walked past this little residential area. The reason this photograph show up now is one of those serendipitous stories. A week or two ago someone asked me a slightly technical photography question. I thought that I might be able to illustrate an answer by using an urban photograph made with a somewhat wide-angle lens, so I began to wade back into older New York photographs to see what I could find. In the end I never used any of them to respond to the question, but I did find a set of four-year-old raw files that I must have neglected to consider at the time.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: north

Kit Fox Hills, Amargosa Range

Conifer Bark

Death Valley, Mountains, Morning

Steps, Red Door In Sun

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