Tag Archives: orange

Winter Sky, California

Image January 16, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter evening sky above the San Joaquin Valley, California

Photographers sometimes have a complicated relationship with sky. On one hand, quite a few of us tend to minimize its presence in photographs, especially when the sky isn’t special. The sort of blue sky day that seems beautiful to non-photographers (and beautiful to photographers when not making photographs!) often produces a plain blue expanse that can seem empty in a photograph. (Not always. It is also possible to use this in some cases, for example to suggest grand space and distance.) Among my photographer friends, quite a few work to minimize the presence of such skies or even eliminate it entirely — to the point that this can become an inside joke. I’ve heard people refer to certain photographs by one friend as “an extremely rare [insert photographer name] photograph of the sky.”

But sometimes the sky begs to be included, and on occasion it can be the main subject. To generalize, the most interesting skies often come in fall, winter, and perhaps spring in California, when much of the state gets its most interesting weather. (There are opportunities in summer, to — how about a clearing thunderstorm?) I made this sky photograph while I was busy photographing another subject. During a slow moment I looked away from that “other thing” and saw these clouds. I pivoted and made a few exposures, just as the last sunset light was illuminating the undersides of the clouds and already beginning to fade from the highest clouds against the darkest sky.

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 and Amazon.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night

Roll-Up Door, Night

Image December 14, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This is another photograph from my recent “alumni night” with The Nocturnes at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard in Vallejo, California — a location where I did my first night photography about fifteen years ago, and to which I return at least a couple of times every year. The places is a sort of Mecca for Bay Area night photographers, almost all of whom have made the place a subject at some point. It holds very old historic ship yard buildings and structures, some areas that are essentially abandoned, a few areas undergoing redevelopment, and the effects of the ever-present San Francisco Bay that surrounds it.

Some things remain the same and others change. This photograph holds a bit of both extremes. The buildings in the scene have been there a long time and I have photographed them in the past. However, the lighting has changed significantly. This used to be an area of extremely dim light, but now there is a new facility just to the left of the area in the frame, and when anyone approaches security lights are activated and they cast a glow across the faintly green building. Its color controls with that of the more distant concrete building illuminated by an entirely different type of light.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.

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

Aspen Color

Image November 13, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Colorful autumn aspen trees in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

On the surface, at least, this is a very simple photograph… so it gets a simple title: Aspen Color. The trees are part of a large (and both popular and accessible) grove in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Like so many others, I stop here each autumn, and I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the trees rising from a creek to far up the surrounding slopes, almost committing to memory the general scene and many of its details. While many Sierra Nevada aspen trees tend to be short and somewhat twisted, at least by comparison to those familiar groves to Colorado trees standing straight and tall, in places in the Sierra you can find those big, stout, and tall trees. This grove is one of those places, though there are plenty of the smaller trees mixed in, too.

On the day I made this photograph the colors in the larger grove varied from deep green to extremely bright yellow/gold, with a few bits of red-orange visible here and there. The latter colors first caught my attention in the spot shown in the photograph. The reddish color was subtle and only in a small area, but it was the starting point for the idea of the photograph. It is hard to make some sort of order out of such complex detail, but the idea was to place a complete tree along the left side of the frame, put that bit of red-orange at lower right, and to include some of the leaves that had not yet lost their green tint.

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

Shoreline, Fallen Tree, Autumn Aspens

Image October 28, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Beyond a dead tree lying in shoreline grasses, an autumn aspen grove rises up a Sierra Nevada hillside

Trying to find different ways to photograph this well-known subject, here I excluded some of the most characteristic features, included both the near and far shorelines, and placed an old fallen tree in the lower part of the frame. If memory serves, that dead tree has been there for a while, and I may have thought of incorporating it during previous visits. The grassy foreground — with grass growing in the lake — produces its own interesting fall colors as it changes from green to brown.

The grove of brilliantly colored aspens across the lake is, at this point, iconic. Indeed, there are frequently quite a few people photographing here. I arrived at an atypical time of day, and on an afternoon when the clouds may have made the conditions seem unpromising to some. As a result there was hardly anyone else there! The clouds worked to my advantage, as they softened the light coming onto the grove from the left, filling the shadows with a bit more light and avoiding the overly bright highlights that are difficult to deal with in full sun.