Tag Archives: orange

Photographs: Urban/Street

Pumpkin Universe

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Pumpkin Universe
What was left of a pumpkin on the day after Halloween.

Pumpkin Universe. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

What was left of a pumpkin on the day after Halloween.

This is another in the “orange series” of photographs that I made in October as part of a seasonal challenge issued by a group of fellow photographers — namely to go out and make photographs of orange things. I’ve written about this in other posts, so I’ll keep the story somewhat short. I started with the obvious Halloween notion of photographing pumpkins, but then I decided to look for ways to photograph them somewhat differently — not jack-o-lanterns and not the common “fall bounty” images. So I headed out into the neighborhood looking for distorted and damaged subjects.

There’s a well-known quote about a photograph being what it is (a supposedly objective visual record) and what else it is (a rather wide field). It should be obvious that you can “see” a photograph in multiple ways — an image of the literal thing, a suggestion of something else that it isn’t, and so on. While this photograph obviously depicts a fairly ordinary thing, I enjoy looking at it as something different from that.

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: 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.

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.