Recently someone who was giving a talk on photography noted that I have been posting a photograph every day for a long time. His guess was that I had been doing so for about four of five years. I told him that I thought that it has been longer than this, but I wasn’t sure how long.
Morning light on the badlands near Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park
Judging from some records I just looked up, I think I may have been doing this since early April 2006! Some of those earliest posts are still there, but the photographs have gone missing — in the course of moving the website between different hosts and transferring the content from one content management system to another some of the early content was lost.
(This was not the first photograph shared I posted online — I was blogging in the mid-1990s, and posting photographs not long afterward. It is a bit scary to think of how many thousands of photographs I must have posted by now!)
My friend (the “someone” mentioned above) was pointing to this history in the context of practice, something that I think is tremendously important in photography. He and I share extensive background and training in music, where the importance of practice is obvious, and where practicing is assumed. Continue reading A Photo A Day: How Long Has This Gone On?→
Welcome to this collection of some of my favorite photographs from 2014. I’ll get to the photos in a moment — yes, on this page! — but first a few stories, a shout out or two to fellow photographers and friends, and more…
This year I photographed a wide range of subjects from musicians to street photography to minimalist images to landscapes. It is always a challenge to select a few images from this variety of work, and invariably some photographs I love had to be left out. The group of photographs shown here was chosen because I like them, because they have been popular with others, and because they represent the diversity this year’s work. This year I think I can truthfully say that they range from the sublime to the ridiculous. (See if you can find the ridiculous one!)
Many wonderful places, subjects, and (especially) people were part of this year’s photography. Here is a partial accounting: The year began with photography of perhaps my favorite winter subject, the migratory birds and the often foggy landscape of California’s Central Valley — as always with friends David Hoffman, Charlotte Hoffman, Michael Frye, Claudia Welsh, and, of course, my wife Patricia Emerson Mitchell. Early in the year we traveled to Yosemite for a few days of shooting in conjunction with the opening of the annual Yosemite Renaissance exhibit, which again included some of my work — and in addition to the photography, it was great to see so many photographer/artist friends in the Valley. In the very early spring we had a good visit to Death Valley, one of my favorite and most frequent subjects — where we encountered snow and, for the first time in my life, I photographed wildflowers in a snowstorm! Among the summer highlights was a train trip across the US to spend a week photographing (and eating and much more) in New York City. Near the end of the summer I joined a group of good friends (Charlie Cramer, Keith Walklet, Mike Osborne, Scot Miller, Annette Bottaro-Walklet, Karl Kroeber and a supporting cast of mules and wranglers) for an extended back-country shoot in Yosemite. Fall took me back to the Sierra for nearly a week of aspen color chasing, and then I made my way back to Utah for fall color and visits to some beautiful out of the way places and ultimately to meet up with family. (Thanks to fellow photographers on that trip: David Hoffman, Guy Tal, Colleen Miniuk-Sperry, Michael Gordon, Charlie Cramer, Bruce Hucko — and to my cousin Barbara and her husband Russ and a few in-laws I met up with near the end of the trip in Zion.) My biggest photographic focus during the fall was the completion of my three-year project to photograph professional classical musicians — and I’m very grateful to the musicians, conductors, management, and staff of the San Jose Chamber Orchestra and Symphony Silicon Valley for their incredible cooperation.
A big “thank you!” to all of you who have followed my photographs here and on social media during the past year, and especially to fellow photographers (a few of whom appear in one of the photos!) that I’ve been fortunate to work with and count as friends. I’m grateful for your support! If this is your first visit to my site, consider bookmarking it, using the sidebar form to subscribe by email and/or…
(Click on any photograph below to switch to a larger scrolling view for best viewing. And I would love to hear what you think — which are your favorites in the group and so forth. Thanks!)
Dawn Light, Fog, Marsh and Tree
Purple Trillium
Point Sur
Pond, Fog, and Sky
Base of the Panamint Range
Desert Mountains, Rain
Backstage Before the Concert
Chinatown Street
The Selfie
Escalator and Stairs
Tropical Leaves
Ginko Leaves, Stones
Cottonwood, Red Rock Canyon
Roots and Rock
Potholes, Dusk
Cracked Mud, Canyon Light
Green and Yellow Aspens
Granite Slabs, Forest, and Lake
Forest Floor, Late Summer
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Is it possible to come back from a place with too many photographs? If so, I may be testing that boundary over the next month or so.
My recent visit to Utah was very productive, and at the moment I have Utah photographs ready to post “as far as the eye can see.” Actually, to be more specific, through the next month (minus a few other subjects on weekends) already, with another couple of weeks or more of photographs of this subject still open in Photoshop.
This brings up several thoughts:
I do not necessarily regard all of the photographs I share on the website and in social media to be “masterpieces” or even my very best work. I do think that at a minimum they are worthy of a look, and I like to post them as part of my own review process. When I (we?) look at my photographs “in secret,” I see them differently than when I share them where others can see them — so this posting is a part of my own review and filtering process. (For those who are interested, they also probably give some insight into how and what I “see.”)
With a total of perhaps a month and a half or more of Utah photographs in the pipeline, I have decided to break up that subject a bit by posting completely different material on weekends and by taking one week in December to continue posting the work from my September back-country photography in Yosemite National Park. That’s right… there is still more work from that adventure!
If you are the sort who just can’t wait to see what is coming, let me share a secret. Before many of the current social media sites caught on, Flickr was the main place to share photographs online. I’ve been on Flickr for many years, and since I was already there I continued to post work there even after other sites became more popular — and my sharing workflow still begins with uploading to Flickr. So you can see what is coming to this website and to Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, ello, and Pinterest by sneaking a look at my Flickr photostream. Or not. ;-)
As a photographer who has so closely identified his work with California — the Sierra, the coast, the redwoods, the deserts, the Central Valley, and more — I’m still a bit surprised at how much I can “see” in Utah and how much photography I have been able to create there!
(The photograph is a sneak preview of one of those upcoming post— it was made in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument of Utah.)
Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. Connections to photography may be tenuous at times!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Richard Mitchell (left) and G Dan Mitchell (right) in Yosemite, date unknown
October 1, 2014 marks the 124 year anniversary of the creation of Yosemite National Park on this day in 1890. To quote from a park web page:
“In 1889, John Muir, America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist, and Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, had growing concerns about the devastating effects of sheep grazing in the high country. They launched a successful campaign to persuade Congress to set aside this area as a national park in 1890. On October 1, 1890, the U.S. Congress set aside more than 1,500 square miles of reserved forest lands, soon to be known as Yosemite National Park.”
(The first federal protections came earlier, on June 30, 1864 when President Abraham Lincoln signed a congressional act that established the “Yosemite Grant” in the Sierra Nevada — the first instance of the US government setting aside land specifically for preservation and public use, though not yet technically a “national park.”)
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the “Yosemite Grant” signing, I wrote a post about my own experience in the park, which includes a bit of my photographic history in the place, including a childhood photograph of me and my brother Richard Mitchell at a park trailhead many years ago, the earliest Yosemite photograph of mine, and a few later shots from the park. Enjoy!
Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment — and the subjects may not always concern photography.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
