Tag Archives: north

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Windows and Reflected Light, Industrial Building

October 6, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A double-reflection of late light from an adjacent building appears in the upper story of this window-covered industrial building near the High Line Park in New York City.

This is another of my photographs from New York City’s High Line Park, made during my late August visit to the city earlier this year. For those who may not know, the High Line is a relatively new (and still under construction) urban park in Chelsea that is “elevated,” being built on the bed of the old elevated railway that passed through here. The park is tremendously popular, especially on summer evenings.

Aside from being a pleasant place to walk, the High Line affords some interesting views that are usually not quite this accessible. There are not to many places where you can walk through a busy urban environment such as Manhattan for a mile or so, out in the open, a couple of stories above street level, with largely unobstructed views of subjects near and far, and above and below. Here the park passes between some taller buildings that are closely spaced, creating an interesting lighting situation. (Oddly, it is a kind of lighting that I often look for when shooting landscape or nature subjects.) The sun is behind the building in the photograph, so the building is largely lit by light from the open sky plus light reflected from the building behind my camera position. You can see that other building in the windows here, the upper floors in direct sun light and the lower in shadow.

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

Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon

October 5, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Afternoon storm clouds clear from the sunset sky above Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon, Yosemite National Park.

With this photograph I get to tell another of the “serendipitous photograph” stories that seem to keep coming up in my work. In this case, we had been camped near the lake in the lower area of the photograph for several days, getting to know the place and having time to carefully photograph various areas nearby. On a previous evening we had climbed to a second lake a few hundred feet higher than the “main” lake, from which one of our group decided to traverse a nearby slope. He ended up at another alpine lake that looked interesting, and the next morning others went with him to visit it. I didn’t, because I had some other things that I wanted to photograph in morning light and because I had a hunch that the light might turn out to be more interesting in the evening, mainly because the area of the lake was open to the west and, therefore, the evening light.

So in the evening, after our typical very early dinner, I departed on a walk to the upper lake that my friends had visited that morning, wandering around “our” lake and through the surrounding forest to pick up a rocky ramp that ascended toward the lake. However, I apparently missed a turn somewhere. I finished the main part of the climb and apparently should have turned left immediately – but I continued on straight ahead and soon found myself in a little meadowy area with a rather steep bunch of rocks between me and my goal. I finally found a circuitous route up a series of ramps, but now it was getting too close to sunset and my turn-around time, so I had to retrace my steps without getting to the lake.

I returned to the small meadow and made a few photographs there, then headed back toward the route by which I had ascended. Despite not making the lake, one of my main goals had been to get up high to photograph the surrounding terrain at sunset, especially since earlier in the day large thunderclouds had been building to the east and creating the possibility of some very special evening light. As I descended the upper part of the “ramp,” the pre-sunset colors started to light up and I quickly found a spot with a good vantage point to view this in several directions. Among the last photographs I made as the light started to fade was the series including this image. (It is actually a composite of two exposures – one for the very bright and saturated clouds and another for the darker shadows down near that lake.) Beyond the lake is the left end of rocky Shepherds Crest and even further in the distance is Virginia Canyon and then the Sierra crest.

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

Corn Lily Leaves, Autumn

October 4, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Corn lily plants take on autumn colors in the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite National Park.

The corn lily plants are among my favorite markers of the passage of the short high Sierra summer season. When the high country first opens and water is everywhere, the first shoots look almost like unhusked ears of corn as they come up in wet areas. (I don’t think this is where the plant gets its name – more on that in a moment.) They quickly grow to several feet tall, clustered in thick bunches, as the mosquito season arrives – and at this time they are incredibly lush and green. At this time they are also a favorite subject for photographers. A few seem to sprout much taller than others and produce clusters of white flowers. Then as August wears on and the soil begins to dry the plants also begin to lose their lush quality and brown areas appear and perhaps some spots and holes appear in the leaves. Often by the end of the month I can find some that are starting to turn one of several shades: golden-yellow, tan, or very dark brown verging on black. By mid September few healthy looking plants remain and the stalks (which look very much like corn stalks) begin to fall over to the ground.

It hardly matters where this particular group of corn lily plants was growing, so I’ll just say that they were within a few minutes of our camp site. I can hardly ever pass up the opportunity to try to photograph this plant, no matter which stage of its life it is currently going through. These had fallen over and were rapidly losing what remained of their green color.

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

Morning Light on Shoreline Trees

October 3, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Early morning light illuminates shoreline trees, meadows and rocks at McCabe lake, with talus and forest-covered slopes beyond, Yosemite National Park.

We were camped at this lake for several days, and by this morning I had developed a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to photograph at different times of the day. My main interest in the early morning was in shooting almost straight back into the sun as it rose above the ridges to the east and began to backlight the lodgepole pines around the lake, especially those along the rocky and meadowy shoreline on the west and south sides. So on this morning, my second-to-last at this lake, I was up reasonably early and off to the other side of the lake before sunrise.

Once I reached the other side of the lake I had two tasks in mind. One was to make a few photographs in the very soft light before the sun reached this area. The other was to find and remember several compositions that might well work when the sun actually arrived. Around the west end of the lake I found several that lined up some of the small shoreline peninsulas and the rocks along the shoreline. After photographing those low light subjects for a while, I noticed that the light was beginning to strike a few trees along the west end of the lake, so I quickly got back in position to start doing the photographs as the sun began to arrive.

This morning presented one slightly unusual shooting challenge. For so late in the season there were a lot of bugs flying around the edges of the lake, including a surprising number of mosquitos. Unfortunately, the same light that so nicely picks up the edges of the backlit trees… also nicely highlighted all of the flying insects along the shoreline! These insects can show up in photographs as hundreds of small to larger blurring streaks – which must be laboriously and individually cloned out in post. Fortunately, I have a way to deal with this and make the process a little easier. I made two exposures of each composition, separated by a second or two. Since it was windless, the trees barely moved at all – but the bugs did move. Since their traces appear at different places in the two images, I can superimpose them in Photoshop and then mask out each bug in the upper image, substituting the corresponding bug free portion of the image from the layer below. It is still a bit of work, but not nearly as bad as trying to clone all of these problems out.

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