Tag Archives: park

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Subalpine Forest, Morning Light

February 3, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on the trees of a subalpine forest in the high country of Kings Canyon National Park

During September 2013 four photographers spent nine days in a remote backcountry area of Kings Canyon National Park, camped at 11,000′ in a beautiful lake-filled basin and spending our days exploring and photographing the surrounding area. Being there for such a long time, we had opportunities to photograph in diverse light and weather conditions, and to return to subjects more than once.

Nearby there was a large subalpine bowl with a dozen or more lakes ranging from quite large to mere tarns. We made the 15 minute walk to this spectacular location many times. We photographed in evening rain, in overcast, in brilliant afternoon light, and in the early morning. I made this photograph on one of those mornings. I had begun very early, when the sun had not yet risen. At first I photographed in the blue-tinted early light, and then I began to chase the light/shade boundary as it crossed the lakes and surrounding terrain. Eventually the sun rose high enough that nearly everything was in the sun, with the exception of a few glades right up against steep slopes. I decided to head back to camp by skirting the shady side of the bowl, and I photographed this beautiful stand of trees backed by rising hills and more distant forest as I began this walk.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Trees and Granite, Morning Light

January 29, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Brilliant morning light shines on subalpine trees and receding granite ridges, Kings Canyon National Park

Back in September of 2013 a group of four photographers headed off into the backcountry of the Kings Canyon National Park Sierra Nevada for nine days. (It occurred to me today that between the four of us, we have well over a century of experience in these mountains!) We crossed a Sierra crest pass at close to 12,000′ feet, another non-crest pass that was even higher, and then landed in a lake-filled basin where we set up camp at 11,000′ for most of a week. This basin is off the main through trails and the trails that do go here essentially dead-end, so there aren’t a lot of visitors here. Because we remained in one spot we were able to get to know the landscape more intimately, looking more closely at places we might have missed if we had just been passing by on the trail, and returning to photographic subjects more than once in changing conditions and light.

Up the valley from our camp was a series of sub-alpine lakes, surrounded by the quintessential High Sierra landscape of glaciated granite, tiny meadows, small trees, and ponds and lakes. I developed an almost daily loop up towards the upper lake, coming and going by different paths, and I began to get a better sense of the personality of this place. I made this photograph by climbing up a granite spine to a high point where the terrain flattened a bit and afforded a view of the surrounding valley. This photograph was made in the morning, when low angle light was streaming across the top of the farther ridge and backlighting the trees in front of me.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Erosion Patterns

January 27, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Deeply furrowed erosion patterns in early morning light, Death Valley National Park

I spent some time photographing Death Valley National Park in mid-December, during a very cold time of the year. It is not unusual for the place to be surprisingly cold in the middle of winter, but this was a period of exceptional cold and it got down to 25 degrees in the Valley and much colder in some of the places I visited in the surrounding desert mountains. I had arrived the evening before I made this photograph, and a sequence of events on the drive it suggest an inauspicious beginning to this visit. I usually come in through Ridgecrest and then up through Trona. I usually drive almost straight through to Ridgecrest and then take a long, late lunch break there – getting my last espresso until I come back out of the park, filling up the gas tank, and so forth. I killed pretty close to an hour taking care of these odds and ends, and then started out of town toward Trona.

Less than a mile up the road I ran into a flashing warning sign announcing that this entrance to the park was closed! This necessitated a bit of backtracking and then travel north up US 395 to then head east toward the park on highway 190. I had originally planned to arrive by mid-afternoon, set up camp, and then photograph in the evening… but by the time I finished all of this driving it was dark when I arrived and I simply pulled into the campground and slept in my car. Early the next morning, feeling just a bit disconnected, I drove over towards 20 Mule Team Canyon where I knew I should be able to find some nice morning light. In fact I did, and I soon found this beautiful miniature landscape of nearly parallel gullies in a hillside along the canyon. As the first light hit the edges off the ridges between the gullies I found a composition that mostly filled the frame with them. I finished shooting here and moved on. At my next location, I finally must have engaged my brain, and I checked the camera to find that it had been left on ISO 3200 from my previous work photographing musicians backstage at a concert in natural light. Groan! So this photograph is one that I managed to salvage from that little escapade… and I’m grateful for the relatively good performance of modern cameras… even when the operator is not paying attention!

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Granite, Water, and Tree

January 22, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small tree growing in a crack in a granite wall above the reflecting surface of a Sierra Nevada lake, Kings Canyon National Park

I have begun to return to the photographs from the September 2013 9-day backcountry trip into the eastern Sierra of Kings Canyon National Park. Four photographers traveled over two nearly-12,000′ passes to reach a basin full of lakes at 11,000′, where we set up camp and photographed for the better part of a week. By staying in one location we were able to come to know the surrounding wilderness intimately, frequently returning to locations at different times of day and in different weather conditions. Of course, even a week in one valley like this one is not sufficient to truly know it – a lifetime might be necessary for that!

When I return from a shoot like this one I’m always anxious to dig into my photographs and see what I came back with. In the field, while I’m complete focused on each photograph as I make it, I quickly move on to the next thing, and after a week of shooting I certain do not recall every shot. The initial pass through the image files always reveals some photographs that speak to me, and others that seem to have potential. I might work them over for a week or two, but then I tend to put them aside and move on to other things. But I’m not done. Some photographs do not reveal themselves to me as quickly as others, and I’ve learned that when I go back to the original files months or even years later I often “discover” photographs that were there all along, but which somehow escaped my attention. This is one of those, though in this case I think I have some ideas about how it ended up waiting for me to revisit it months later. First, when I made the photograph I knew there was something about these patterns that was photographable – but at the time I recall being a bit challenged by making a composition out of it that did not include some distracting materials above the elements you see here. At the same time, another photograph of a similar subject turned out to be one of those that worked right away, and I think that encouraged me to move on past this one. This week I began to revisit these files and when I saw this one it was almost immediately obvious to me that it would work with his wider crop, which solved the problem of the “distracting materials” that I mentioned above. I like several things about this photograph: its subtle color palette, the strong abstract patterns of cracked rock and green-gray lichen, the very small tree growing in the crack in the rocks.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: park

Subalpine Forest, Morning Light

Trees and Granite, Morning Light

Erosion Patterns

Granite, Water, and Tree

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