Tag Archives: pale

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Sand Waves

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Sand Waves
Rising waves of sand in soft light, Death Valley National Park

Sand Waves. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Rising waves of sand in soft light, Death Valley National Park.

This photograph comes from a memorable visit to a remote location in Death Valley National Park about eight years ago. I was in the park during the first few days of January. I saw far fewer other visitors than I usually encounter there these days, and I experienced some very cold temperatures! A few days earlier the thermometer in my vehicle registered at freezing as I drove below sea level very early one morning. On the morning after I made this photograph I finally got around to checking the temperature at around 9:00AM after the sun had come up, only to discover that it was still in the low twenties!

When I arrived at this location in the late afternoon there was only one other small group of visitors. (They were gone when I came back from photographing, and I had the place completely to myself that night.) I figured out where I would camp that night, and then I grabbed my photography gear and headed out into the nearby landscape of sand with distant vistas of playa and mountains. It was late enough the I soon found myself photographing the dunes in soft, post-sunset light.

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: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Portal, Wall, and Cable

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Portal, Wall, and Cable
Portal, Wall, and Cable

Portal, Wall, and Cable. New York, New York. August 18, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Looking through a portal in a yellow wall towards a white wall beyond, lit by diffused light.

This is almost, but perhaps not quite, a “photograph of nothing.” As we walked through this New York City museum I was distracted by the way the light hit different surfaces, especially because the light was especially diffused on this cloudy morning – and I was intrigued by the juxtapositions of different colors and shapes and types of lighting that I could find as I moved through this space. This minimalist image consists of an open portal with what must be a safety cable along the bottom sill, with a large room with white walls beyond, and another similar portal and a corner breaking up the white walls near the left side of the image.

Ideally it would be best to shoot this from a tripod at low ISO and a long shutter speed and perhaps with a prime. However, here I had to improvise, shooting hand held at 1/20 second (yay for IS!) with a zoom lens that required some distortion correction in post.

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Wall, Stairway, and Late Afternoon Shadows

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Wall, Stairway, and Late Afternoon Shadows
Wall, Stairway, and Late Afternoon Shadows

Wall, Stairway, and Late Afternoon Shadows. San Jose, California. December 24, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late afternoon shadows cast by a stairway cross a beige stucco and wooden wall.

This is another in the wandering about with only a 50mm prime series shot on Christmas eve afternoon. I have photographed this wall and stairway before, but here the strong diagonal lines of the shadows from the stairs cut across the horizontals and verticals in the image and almost seem disorienting to me. I swore that the lines in the photo were tilted until I checked them against an on-screen grid – and they still look out of kilter to me even though I know they are not.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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keywords: urban, street, structures, stairs, stairway, conduit, wiring, pale, beige, brown, steps, wood, stucco, panel, shadow, diagonal, lines, light, late, afternoon, gas, meter, pole, barricade, sidewalk, cement, parking, lot, asphalt, leaves, litter, trash, garbage, vertical, horizontal, pipe, stock

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Fairy Lantern (Calochortus albus) Flower and Buds

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Fairy Lantern (Calochortus albus) Flower and Buds

Fairy Lantern (Calochortus albus) Flower and Buds. Almaden Quicksilver Park, California. April 18, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A fairy lantern flower in bloom with several buds on the plant yet to bloom.

I photographed this flower over the weekend along a trail at Almaden Quicksilver Park that I visit about this time every year… to photograph this flower. While I occasionally see the Fairy Lantern flower in other locations – if I look carefully – a small valley along the New Almaden Trail near the Mockingbird Hill entrance to the park often contains hundreds of these flowers. I thought that this weekend (April 18 and 19) would mark the peak of the bloom, but my hike their yesterday left me thinking that it may be another week – while some of the flowers had bloomed, many more were still only buds, as are the majority of this specimen.

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

keywords: fairy, lantern, chinese, flower, bud, bloom, wildflower, pale, pink, round, green, leaf, pointed, stem, plant, bokeh, nature, foliage, forest, floor, almaden, quicksilver, mines, county, park, santa clara, san jose, nature, stock, Calochortus albus