Tag Archives: pacific

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Twilight, Monterey Bay

December 20, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Post-sunset light over the winter surf of Monterey Bay, California.

I’ve had some opportunities to photograph in the Monterey and Big Sur area this week. For the most part, it has been a bit tricky as the light has been less than cooperative. I was out and about early on this day but ended up spending a couple hours looking for photographs… and never found one! (I did find some very interesting locations that I had to previously visited, however, and I think I’ll be heading back to photograph them in the future when I have better light.)

In the evening I thought that I might just head over to the coast line along Pacific Grove. Initially I stopped to photograph along a beach near Asilomar, where people were walking toward the sunset, the surf was impressive, and the shoreline sand reflected the colors of the sky. Then I turned to my right and thought that I might try another minimalist seascape, this time by waiting until the sun had set and the light diminished to the point that I could make some relatively long exposures. I anchored the scene with the bit or rock at the lower left corner and then tried to time my long exposures for moments when the rocks would be all or partially uncovered. By the time I finished shooting it was almost too dark to see my camera!

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Photographs: Imaginary Landscapes, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Surf, Rocks, and Horizon

November 14, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An imaginary landscape from surf, rocks and horizon at Point Lobos State Reserve, California.

I refer to photographs like this one as “imaginary landscapes” – though I suppose that this one is actually an imaginary seascape. The boundary between these photographs and my Regular Old Garden Variety Landscapes is a bit nebulous, but it relates to how far and how intentionally the interpretation of the scene departs from what might be regarded as its objective reality. In this case, some things were done at the time of exposure and some other things were done in post that make this image more obviously a subjective interpretation of the scene than might be the case with many of my other photographs. But you could see that by looking at it, right?

In any case, this is a single photographic “capture” made with a long exposure time that was extended by the use of a nine-stop neutral density filter – and this is what creates the majority of the soft quality of the image. Some additional work was done in post to further manipulate the original image – work with saturation and certain ways of diffusing portions of the image and so forth. In the end, little of that matters beyond the fact that these techniques were ways of producing the image that I had in mind, and which I intend to evoke something about the nature of the real scene upon which it is based.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Forest in Afternoon Light

November 1, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A dense forest backlit by afternoon light along the Northern California coast.

If you follow my blog, you know that I frequently photograph all around the Sierra, in the deserts east and south of the range, in coastal California in the San Francisco Bay Area and south, and even in the Central Valley. I’m almost a bit embarrassed, however, to admit to barely having scratched the surface of the photographic opportunities of “real” northern California, along the coast or inland. While I frequently shoot north of San Francisco, most of this work has been done no farther north than about Point Reyes.

This past weekend my wife and I managed a quick getaway that took us up to and slightly beyond Mendocino, where we spent a couple of nights. This wasn’t meant to be a photographic excursion, but I have a very understanding wife! She did not object when I stopped from time to time on our drive to get out the camera gear and make a few photographs. Truth be told, she made a few herself! I tried to keep the photography under control – after all, this trip was more about relaxing, seeing the sights, enjoying some good food, and so forth – but I did stop a few times make some photographs. And I also realized that I really need to head back up into this area and begin to seriously explore this region that is right at my virtual doorstep, and which is in many ways quite different from the “other Californias” that I’ve become familiar with.

This photograph was made in an extensive deciduous forest in a more or less random spot along the road, north of Fort Bragg and in an area where highway 1 takes an inland jog.

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

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

September 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A tree and granite slab are lit by brilliant sunset light from a dissipating evening thunderstorm, Yosemite National Park.

This was another of those sometimes-surprising bursts of evening Sierra color that results in effects so gaudy that they almost seem unreal – but this is real. I was camped down in a valley among trees so I wasn’t initially expecting much in the way of spectacular sunset photography. Instead, I planned to take advantage of the early shadows in the valley and get some evening photographs under soft light without any direct sun at all. I first worked some moving water where the nearby river flowed across granite slabs, and then I contemplated photographing some small plants in deeply cracked and patterned granite. As a worked my way across this granite, I remembered a small tree on the other side of the bowl that had looked like an interested photo subject a few days ago, so I walked over to that area where the tree stands in a shallow granite bowl.

Earlier in the afternoon I could see huge thunderheads building up to my east, but they did not move far enough west to affect me with anything more than a bit of gray sky. However, as the clouds built up to higher elevations, their tops began to take on the familiar “anvil” shape and the upper portions of the “anvils” began to spread to the west and out over my position. This is a classic setup for potentially spectacular evening sky color. Near sunset the clouds can pick up intense red/orange coloration from the sun setting in the west. At the same time, the storms begin to dissipate, creating semi-transparent “curtains” of virga (falling rain that doesn’t reach the ground), unusual shapes along the bottoms of the clouds, clouds emerging out of the gray murk as the sunset light picks them up.

As I arrived at my little tree, I quickly lost interest in that subject as the cloud light show began. First the bottom of the thunderhead began to turn brilliantly orange and red. Then the lower reaches of the small storm began to produce very unusual cloud shapes including mammatus clouds. Virga produced a brightly colored by semi-transparent scrim. It quickly became so bright that the red/orange colors began to wash the granite bowl, and I turned my camera from the little tree to the uphill granite surfaces and the clouds above.

In this vertical format image the tip of a small tree extends above the top of a dome-like area above me, and the brilliant light from the clouds washes the dome with color. The colors here have not been “amped up” in post – in fact, I’ve actually toned some of them down a bit!

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