Tag Archives: peninsula

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Shoreline Trees, Morning Light

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Shoreline Trees, Morning Light
Morning light on shoreline trees at a backcountry Yosemite National Park lake.

Shoreline Trees, Morning Light. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on shoreline trees at a backcountry Yosemite National Park lake.

Our group spent the better part of a week camped near this northern Yosemite Lake, exploring it, its two companion lakes, and the surrounding high country. We camped in the forest a ways back from this lake, but it was only a minute away and thus became a daily subject for photography, especially in the morning when the light come over the ridges to our east and backlight the shoreline trees.

This subject, in this light, presented a pair of interesting challenges of the sort that you only learn to appreciate after doing landscape photography in such places. The first came from shooting toward the light from the edge of the lake. Photographers know the issues with flare that can result from light hitting the lens directly — but multiply that times two when the light comes from above and from the reflections from the lake’s surface. The gyrations necessary to block both often prove interesting. The second challenge was… mosquitos! Not just that the fiends, biting little devils annoyed us constantly, but also that their blurry forms tend to appear in photographs when viewed closely. You don’t know the meaning of fun until you’ve cloned a few hundred of them out of a photograph!

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Forest and Fog

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Forest and Fog
Sunlight begins to thin the morning fog in a Monterey Peninsula forest.

Forest and Fog. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Sunlight begins to thin the morning fog in a Monterey Peninsula forest.

Today we visit the California coast below the Monterey Peninsula, at the Point Lobos State Reserve. (That is the actual name, though many of us casually refer to it as a state “park.”) I have gone to this place for decades, since my parents took us there as kids. Back then the big attractions were the tide pools (the number one attraction!), the various sea mammals, and the surf. Those are still on my list when I go there, though now I’m more likely to go with the goal of making photographs. (The place, like so much of the Big Sur coast, has become almost impossibly popular, so I try to visit at odd, off-peak times.)

I had gone down there on this 2013 early spring day to make photographs. My typical routine is to arrive very early, before those crowds show up, and spend a few hours photographing in relative quiet. This time I headed to a location in the more northerly portion of the small preserve, where there are views back across the coastal forests and toward the low hills to the east. Because it was morning, the sun was coming over those hills just as the fog was starting to then, allowing a bit more light into the gaps between the trees.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Sur Point, Autumn Sky

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Sur Point, Autumn Sky
Precursor clouds from an incoming weather front in the sky above Sur Point.

Sur Point, Autumn Sky. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Precursor clouds from an incoming weather front in the sky above Sur Point.

The mound at the lower right in this photograph is Sur Point, the site of an old lighthouse facility along the Big Sur coast of California. The historic facility has been there for a long time. From what I understand it was originally so isolated that the families that manned the facility had to grow their own food, and they were resupplied only occasionally and by ship. The point sits on a low peninsula, connected to the mainland only by a low, sandy spit of land.

This photograph embodies several things that attract me to portions of this rugged (though today quite accessible) coastline. It sits at the western edge of a continent populated by a people whose history included (largely but not exclusively) arrival here at the far end of journeys from the east. (Today it just be acknowledged that an increasing number arrived by other paths and that before those of us with shorter histories here arrived others had been here for millennia.) Here, as we look over the eastern edge of the world’s largest ocean, there is a sense of vast, monumental space — something that I like and have not been able to experience as much as I would like during the pandemic.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Peninsula, Lake, Morning Light

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Peninsula, Lake, Morning Light
Morning light on a rocky peninsula, reflected in the deep green waters of an alpine lake

Peninsula, Lake, Morning Light. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on a rocky peninsula, reflected in the deep green waters of an alpine lake.

My morning visit to this lake above our basecamp was fortuitously timed. I’d love to take credit for great planning, but I must admit that luck played a big role. I had a plan — it involved heading up that way quite early and then taking the time to ascend a low ridge and walk to the far side of the lake. But none of that happened. While I did get a reasonably early start, I was soon distracted by other subjects along the route to the lake, and I ultimately arrived there later than I had planned. However, my inability to stick to my schedule played to my advantage.

I arrived at the lake’s outlet, a long and narrow channel of still water, to find that the “quiet light” (thanks, Keith Walklet) was still there, so I paused to photograph that scene in soft shadows. Soon I decided to move on and head up and over that low ridge… but I immediately saw another scene that I had to photograph, some lichen-covered rocks along the shoreline. Finishing with this distraction, I now realized that I really had to get moving and climb that ridge. But by now the sunlight was on that ridge, and its reflection was casting lovely soft light back on a rocky peninsula and the boulder-strewn shoreline. So — again! — I stopped to make photographs of this scene. But this one took longer, as the light continued to develop and increase, until sunlight began to illuminate the water itself, building abstractions of light and color and reflections in front of the peninsula. (In the end I never did cross that ridge or go to the other side of the lake!)

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.