Tag Archives: patterns

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Sandstone Patterns, Dried Plant

November 9, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A dried plant and sandstone patterns in a southwest desert canyon, Utah

I was in Utah twice this fall, most recently with my friends Charlie and Karl to photograph a range of desert canyons and similar terrain. I’ve written before that I’m very new to photographing Utah, having seriously shot there for the first time only this past spring. But I’m trying to make up for lost time! Overall, I have spent something like a total of more than five weeks there this year! Yes, I like shooting in Utah. :-)

On the previous visits, I went to quite a few of the well-known locations – largely the national parks – and began the process of getting to know and understand that place a bit. On the most recent visit I was fortunate to be traveling with people who have shot there for decades, and I benefited from their long experience. Getting a bit more off the beaten track, we barely touched national parks – passing through Zion and visiting some remote areas of Capitol Reef. Instead we poked into a range of little canyons and valleys and so forth that don’t have the prominence of the parks. The specific locations are perhaps not that important since the state seems to be filled with similar places. This was my first real experience with the intimate desert canyons and river/creek courses that carve deeply into the landscape, where midday light bounces and reflects into the deep landscape in ways that are utterly unlike the California locations where I most often photograph.

This photograph was made in such a place, the first narrow canyon that we visited. Parking in an inauspicious spot along a gravel desert road, we dropped into a wash and wandered upstream, soon entering a narrow canyon as the sandstone walls rose beside us. Before long the canyon was narrow enough that we had to continually cross back and forth across the creek or simply wade straight up its course. As the canyon narrowed, direct sunlight no longer made it down to the creek – instead the light reflected from the higher cliff faces and bounced down into the canyon, toning the light red from the sandstone surface. In this photograph the cliff and two large pieces of sandstone contain angled strata and reflect the light in various ways as a small and seemingly dead plant sits in a crack in the rock.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Textures

Cloud Forms #3 – September 16, 2012

September 18, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening sky above Olmsted Point in the Yosemite Sierra.

On my return from a mid-September eastern Sierra backpack trip, I again passed through Yosemite National Park on the Tioga Pass Road. By a bit of luck combined with some planning, I managed to time of my passage so that I could be there during the last hour or so of the day, figuring I might try to grab a few last opportunistic photographs before driving back to the Bay Area after dark. With that long, dark drive ahead of me, I decided to aim for a stopping point a bit further west along the route, and I stopped about a half hour before sunset at Olmsted Point.

Although I have a number of photographs of the iconic image of the “backside” of Half Dome from this location, the lighting here can be interesting enough that I’ll stop and try “one more time” if I happen to be there. As is often the case, the lighting did not initially appear too promising. The typical autumn wildfire haze was in the air, lending a bit of a yellow/brown color to the hazy lower atmosphere, and the higher clouds seems thin. But if there is one thing that I (and just about any other landscape photographer!) have learned by now, it is that the last minutes of daylight {and the first moments after the sun sets} can be full of surprises. I began with the practical step of scoping out a composition of the iconic dome, but then I turned my attention to lots of other subjects that surround Olmsted Point: the sparse trees ascending the granite slabs across the roadway, higher ridges across Tenaya Canyon and in the opposite direction, the Sierra crest around Mount Conness, and the sky. For a brief moment after the sunlight had left Olmsted Point, the final rays passed through atmosphere near the western horizon and lit up the patterned layers of clouds and drifting wildfire smoke.

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

Badwater Salt Flats, Evening

November 2, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Black and white photograph of rough patterns in the dried salt desert floor at Badwater Salt Flats, Death Valley National Park.

This is another of the “rediscovered photographs” that I uncovered while reviewing many years of raw files recently. Periodically I go through all of the old archived raw files, partly to cull out a few that I know that I’ll never use, but also because I know that whenever I revisit the old files I discover some photographs that I had forgotten or had never understood at the time I made them. Revisiting the old file archives, I’m sometimes shocked that I passed over certain images.

This one is from the salt flats at Badwater in Death Valley National Park. Technically, this was not shot at precisely “Badwater,” but it is close enough. I was out on the flats in the late afternoon, shooting as the sun dropped behind the Panamint Range. In my view, the best light – with the exception of days when clouds might tower above the Panamints – comes starting right about at the time that the sun passes the line of the ridge as it descends at the end of the day. This takes the incredibly bright and harsh sun off of the playa and provides softer light in the shadow of the range. However, this also presents a problem that almost everyone who has shot here must understand, namely that the illumination by the bright blue sky turns the “white” salt a surprisingly intense blue color. I’ve seen people handle this in a variety of ways: keep the intense, almost gaudy, blue color; do a lot of color correction to get colors that more closely correspond to what we recall seeing; mostly include the sky with its more intense colors; or let the colors go and do a black and white rendition.

Although I’ve “done” this subject in color a number of times, somehow this one seemed to call out for black and white. For one thing, it allowed me to use the interesting shapes of the evening clouds as a dramatic backdrop to the rough and broken shapes of the playa salt polygons. It also allowed me to try an interpretation that focuses on the dramatic potential of the scene.

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

Detail, Zabriskie Point Formations

April 23, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Detail photograph of patterns of barren hills and gullies at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park, California.

From my series of detail photographs of smaller elements of the landscape at Zabriskie, and another one shot during atypical times of day – in this case in very bright afternoon sunshine. Because of these lighting conditions – color, intensity, and angle, the quality of the image is less “dreamy” than the typical early morning soft-light photographs of this area. Here you see more clearly the rough texture of the material making up the folds and gullies of these interesting hills that drop into Gower Gulch.

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.

Technical Data:
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM at 330mm
ISO 100, f/16, 1/50 second

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