Tag Archives: orange

Photographs: Urban/Street

Morning After

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Morning After
Sad pumpkin, the day after Halloween.

Morning After. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Sad pumpkin, the day after Halloween.

And you thought we’d get through this season without me sharing a pumpkin picture. No such luck! A couple of weeks ago someone suggested making photographs of orange things. Pumpkins seemed kind of too obvious, but in the end I could not entirely resist. Mostly I kept my eyes open for anything that was orange — signs, paint, vehicles, lights — but somehow these gourds kept jumping into the frame. (If you have never tried it, going out and constraining your photography to a color or a shape or something similar is a great exercise.) One thing I learned from the process is that “orange” is much more nebulous concept than I had thought — the “edges” of this color bleed over into red, yellow, and brown.

This sad fellow was sitting at the edge of a driveway in a pile of leaves on the morning after Halloween. The expression seemed like the ultimate “meh” look to me. Finally, in case you are wondering… yes, there is still one more pumpkin photograph to come. I know you are thrilled!

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” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Nature

Orange Pepper No. 1

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Orange Pepper No. 1
Habanero peppers from the garden, awaiting their fate as pepper jelly.

Orange Pepper No. 1. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Habanero peppers from the garden, awaiting their fate as pepper jelly.

Not just orange peppers but habanero peppers, one of the hotter varieties. I ended up growing a habanero pepper plant in the vegetable garden this year and the darned this was extremely productive. If you know your peppers, you perhaps understand that you probably don’t need a whole lot of habaneros — a little of its heat goes a long ways. So, finding myself with dozens of them, I made jelly. Batch #1 was so good that I picked the rest of the crop, and most of them will end up in batch #2.

The path to deciding to photograph them is a bit contorted. A group of friends and photographers get together periodically (these days in the virtual world) to share photographs on some sort of theme. This month’s theme was the color orange. I have a ton of photographs of orange aspen leaves — not surprising for the guy who wrote a book on photographing aspen color! — but that seemed too obvious. So I set out to look for orange things in my neighborhood and home. A few things surprised me. The first was how vague and variable the concept of “orange’ becomes once you pay attention — at the fringes it bleeds across into red, yellow, and/or brown. The second surprise was how few of these orange things spoke to me as photographs. (Some did, and you’ll see more of them soon.) Then, just as I thought I was done.. right in front of me, on the kitchen counter, was this example of orange!

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” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Red Wall Sunrise

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Red Wall Sunrise
Saturated sunrise light on sandstone cliffs and ledges, Zion National Park.

Red Wall Sunrise. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Saturated sunrise light on sandstone cliffs and ledges, Zion National Park.

If you have been reading my posts about Utah recently, you may recall that I mentioned the striking contrast between my home range, the Sierra Nevada, and the far more colorful landscapes of Utah. Every time I return from red rock country the California landscape seems so… gray. (Don’t worry. I get over this quickly, and there’s plenty to photograph here, too!) But in many places in Utah the combination of blue sky, red rock, and green foliage — often with a few other colorations mixed in — produces a landscape of remarkably varied coloration.

But sometimes things go just a bit over the top. I have a few photographers here and there in my archives where the colors were so intense or so unusual that I hesitate the share them, as I know that someone will inevitably doubt that the photograph represents something close to what happened. (To be sure, photographs do not simply “capture” what the camera saw, and most good photography involves some level of post processing… just like good writing involves some degree of editing.) This sunrise light in Zion Canyon produced something that seems, at least in a photograph, to be unbelievable and even impossible. But red dawn light on red rock walls actually can look like this, at least for a brief interval. The truth of the matter here is that I had to reduce the color saturation!

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” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

The Last Leaves

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The Last Leaves
An aspen tree with a few remaining autum leaves, against a cliff face wtih snow.

The Last Leaves. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Aspen trees with a few remaining autumn leaves, against a cliff face with snow.

The Sierra Nevada experience of the past year-and-a-half or so has been… strange. Everything has changed since our world was turned upside down in March of 2020, and my ability to visit and photograph my favorite mountain range has not been an exception. During the first summer we saw many locations simply shut down, and I didn’t really get into the Sierra until the very end of that summer — but only for very brief visits and one aborted pack trip that I had to cancel as a result of the intense wildfire smoke. By last winter I was again able to more comfortably get to non-Sierra locations including Death Valley, where it was possible to work in relative isolation, but the Sierra remained difficult to access. I got up there a few times later in the season, but it wasn’t until this fall that I felt that I was beginning to reconnect with this landscape.

In mid-October we put together an actual road trip. It began with a couple of nights in the Eastern Sierra before continuing on to Southwest Utah, another location that I hadn’t been to in far too long. This brief autumn Sierra visit (which followed another visit a week earlier) was a bit later than usual, and we ended up visiting a few places that I usually overlook… and heading to a few “old friends” even though they were past their prime. I made this photograph in one of those places, a location where the colors are usually spectacular a bit earlier in the season. I knew that wouldn’t be the case this time, so we went there a bit later in the day after photographing more promising morning subjects. We arrived, made a quick stop, and I spotted this small group of trees in the shadow of a cliff. They were nearly at the end of their color transition and most of the leaves were gone, but those that remained glowed in the bit of light arriving over the top of the cliff.

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” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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