Tag Archives: north

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Storm, Mono Lake

August 31, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dark clouds of a massive summer thunderstorm move across Mono Lake.

This has been the “summer of the monsoon” in the Sierra Nevada. Although the range is terribly dry after four years of drought and this past winter’s truly anemic snow pack, summer has brought a greater than usual amount of monsoonal flow from the south, producing a great deal of thunderstorms and rain. In July I saw an odd juxtaposition of nearly snow free peaks and ridges that looked like late September of a dry year… along with green meadows and full ponds where the rains had fallen.

By the time of this early August visit to the Yosemite High Sierra and then a few days of backpacking on the east side of the range further south, things were drying out a bit and the foliage was taking on the usual late-August dry appearance. I camped down in Lee Vining Canyon the first night, and being close to Mono Lake I managed to head out there and make photographs after setting up camp. Thunderstorms were forming above the Sierra crest, and they had sprinkled on my camp. They then drifted east of the range and continued to build, so as I looked along this section of the north shore of Mono Lake, with Black Point and Negit Island visible in the foreground, the sky in the distance was turbulent, dark, and full of falling rain.

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

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Three Men, Urban Garden

August 29, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Three men sitting on benches in a downtown San Francisco courtyard

This seemed like a rare quiet scene in this part of San Francisco, along busy Market Street, which is crowded with tourists, locals, buses and taxis at this time of year. While walking through this area with my camera I had taken a break to grab a coffee when I saw this scene right outside the window.

There are many things that strike me about the relationship between urban environments like this one and the natural world that is also a subject of my photography. Places like Market Street are so antithetical to almost the entirety of the rest of the world — they noise and bustle and crowds are truly an anomaly on this planet. In some places it is quite possible to see almost no evidence of that non-human world, except perhaps by looking straight up at the sky. Yet in places like this an image of that world, synthetic though it may be, is constructed — and it brings some quiet and stillness.

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

Mount Dana

August 28, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light, Mount Dana and Dana Meadows

On an evening early in my mid-July visit to Yosemite’s high country, I parked my car along Tioga Pass Road and next to a meadow that is an old friend of mine, shouldered my pack and tripod, and wandered slowly into the landscape, knowing that there was too much to see to warrant hurrying. I dropped to a low flat area, only to discover that water was flowing across it beneath the meadow foliage, so I spent a bit of time looking for a dry path through the section. A bit further on I climbed a low rise with glacial boulders and small trees on top, and I paused here to look for a while and then made a few photographs before moving on.

The photographs from this spot included some of this slope leading toward the summit of Mount Dana, the second tallest peak in the park at just over 13,000 feet of elevation. From my location in this subalpine meadow, the terrain gradually ascends through dense forest, with trees gradually becoming smaller, past the tree line to where only smaller shrubs and bushes grow, and on up to alpine tundra. Clouds shrouded the peak on this evening, leftovers from early thunderstorm weather. Of all these things, photographically I was most interested in the close meadow, rocks, and trees Oddly, when I returned home I initially ignored this photograph, but later on I went back and looked again and ended up feeling that it conveys a true sense of this sort of country.

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Service Station, Billboards

August 27, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Billboards tower over a service station in morning light, San Francisco

There are many kinds of landscapes to photograph, and I like most of them. This one happens to be an urban landscape, a subject that I like a lot. I made the photograph on one of my periodic walks through parts of San Francisco. This one, as most of them do, started at the Caltrain station very early in the morning and headed straight up toward Market Street. This gas station is right near a freeway interchange, and probably ideally situated for people arriving in or departing from downtown San Francisco.

I know that a scene like this may simply baffle some viewers, especially those who are more drawn to nature and natural landscape photographs with their depictions of unspoiled beauty. I understand. But even in the city there is beauty, and the light was especially wonderful on this morning — blue sky with scattered fog breaking up created a soft but still directional quality to the muted light. My eyes first went to the billboards, whose backsides here tower above the surrounding buildings — urban mountains or cliffs, perhaps? But alone they did not seem to make a photograph. But then I saw the light on that wall with the “PRINTING” sign, and the contrast between the blues of the sky and wall and the hot reds and yellows of the corporate colors on the gas station.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: north

Storm, Mono Lake

Three Men, Urban Garden

Mount Dana

Service Station, Billboards

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