Tag Archives: photo

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

Frost-Rimmed Oak Leaves, Autumn

November 15, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A very cold autumn morning brings a touch of frost to late-fall oak leaves in Yosemite Valley

Earlier this week I had (just barely) enough time for a very quick one-day up-and-back visit to Yosemite Valley. Such a visit, entailing a four-hour drive each way, and beginning with a 3:30 a.m. alarm going off, is not completely fun in all imaginable ways… but I won’t complain in front of people who might regard a visit to this valley as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’m fortunate to live where I’m able to get to such a place and back in a day. The reason for the quick visit was that I had not made my annual “autumn leaves” visit to the Valley. In a typical year I do that right around the first of November (though I often think of it as a Halloween trip!) when the maple, oak, and dogwood leaves can be very colorful. I thought that I had missed the show this year, but over the weekend I heard from friends that there were still leaves in The Valley, so I figured that I would try to get up there for a quick visit.

Having gone there for decades, I no longer go straight for the usual iconic subjects – though I will photograph them when the conditions are extraordinary. Instead, I often end up poking around in odd corners, looking for things that are smaller and less easily seen, but which I associate with The Valley just as much as, say, Half Dome or El Capitan or Yosemite Falls. So, odd as it may seem, when I made my first stop of the day at El Capitan Meadow, with its iconic views of Sentinel Rocks and El Capitan on opposite sides of The Valley… I spent the first 15 minutes with my lens pointed down into a small patch of the Merced River where there were some interesting reflections, and then I wandered off along the river bank in a few inches of snow to photograph close-up views of the wonderful oak leaves rimmed with morning frost. It occurred to me later that some might think it is a bit odd to drive so far to photograph such things!

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Photographs: Arizona, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: The Southwest

Rain Squall, Monument Valley

November 14, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Distant mesas and towers of Monument Valley, veiled by a passing rain squall

I have a bit of a surprising confession to make. Utah is not the only state in the American Southwest that I had not previously photographed. Although I have been in the state before, I had never photographed there prior to this year, when we made a quick pass though the upper portion of the state on a drive between Moab and Zion National Park. Several things explain this. First, as I’ve written before, I’ve long been a California landscape bigot – the “local” landscapes of ocean and mountains and deserts and redwoods and more have been, and continue to be, such a focus that I’ve felt little inclination to shoot elsewhere. More recently, as I discovered Utah, I felt a bit of an obligation to avoid Arizona for certain other reasons that I won’t go into right now.

That’s right. I’ve never photographed the Grand Canyon. In fact, I haven’t even seen the Grand Canyon except from the air while flying over the state. And, no, I had not seen Monument Valley either. As we left Moab and headed south, I was excited about seeing this new landscape, but a bit concerned about the potential for photography as a storm – and not just the afternoon monsoon – was moving through. Sure enough, just about the time we got near to Monument Valley the clouds thickened, the wind blew, and it began to rain in earnest. However, I soon caught sight of the towers and mesas of this valley in the distance, familiar from so many photographs I’ve seen, and I quickly realized that the rainy conditions were actually going to provide some very special light and effects. This photograph is a case in point. It was cloudy but not raining at my camera position. Just beyond, a passing squall was dropping rain across the desert terrain and muting and blurring the features, but beyond that the sun was shining on the stupendous distant formations, and beyond them broken clouds were moving.

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

Cracked Sandstone

November 13, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Large cracks in layers of sandstone, Zion National Park

On our way to Utah points further east in late October, we passed through Zion National Park and ended up spending the better part of a day photographing along the Mount Carmel Highway route through the park. There are any number of places here to park the car, get out, and walk down into the narrow washes and valleys or climb up to various prominences. On this day the prospect was even more interesting since autumn color had come to the high country – much more than in the more famous Zion Canyon – and the oak and red maple trees were showing brilliant and vivid colors.

At several points we decided to investigate small canyons that passed near the roadway, and several of them included short stretches that were very narrow. There is a lot of tortured looking geology in some of these places, the result of eroding and sculpting power of the sand and water and other processes. Here a large “chunk” of sandstone was leaning away from the creek and was cracking, both along the natural strata in the rock and perpendicular the layers. In these places it is often interesting to see how seemingly solid rock can take on the qualities of a plastic material that has been bent and carved.

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

Fractured Sandstone Detail

November 12, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Details of fractured sandstone rock, Zion National Park

On this day we had driven across a good chunk of Arizona and southern Utah while traveling from Moab towards Springdale and Zion – and it had rained, heavily at times and lightly most of the day. Back in Arizona many of the creeks and rivers had come back to life, and north of where we were it may have been snowing. By the time we reached Zion and headed across the Mount Carmel Highway on our way to Springdale, everything was quite wet.

Rain radically changes the appearance of this portion of the park. (In truth, it changes the appearance of many things, but that is a topic for another post!) There were puddles and rivulets everywhere, and those dry waterfalls that characterize this country were no longer dry. The clouds soften the light and fill in the shadows, and the moisture intensifies the colors, especially the red and pink colors of the sandstone. Shortly after entering the park we pulled over and spent some “quality time” exploring this change near a small valley that held pools and a little temporary creek, and I found this area of fractured sandstone.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: photo

Frost-Rimmed Oak Leaves, Autumn

Cracked Sandstone

Fractured Sandstone Detail

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