Tag Archives: pink

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

First Light, Eastern Sierra

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First Light, Eastern Sierra
Pre-sunrise light on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

First Light, Eastern Sierra. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pre-sunrise light on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.

As I queue up photographs for future posts this morning I seem to be alternating, in a way, between the ridiculous and the sublime. The previous image I posted was one of a broken pumpkin, cast aside next to the curb on the morning after Halloween. The photograph shown here comes from a rather different sort of morning, before dawn in a high place just below the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, awaiting the arriving of sunrise light on an autumn morning.

Photographs (and, arguably, especially landscape photography) is largely about the light. The great subjects are always there, and many of them stand still for hours, days, seasons, years. But the light is never really the same twice, even though we can recognize certain categories of light. One beautiful sort is the softly colored light that may appear just before sunrise when the conditions in the sky are just right to produce some color. I had arrived at this location quite early, having made a prior plan to photograph here, but I could not know exactly what the light would do. Although my plan was to photograph the first sunrise light on the tops of the peaks, it was this soft, early light that turned out to be the most fascinating.

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: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Sunset, Wildfire Haze

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Sunset, Wildfire Haze
Trees in Yosemite wilderness sunset light made colorful by wildfire smoke.

Sunset, Wildfire Haze. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Trees in Yosemite wilderness sunset light made colorful by wildfire smoke.

This is one more in the series of photographs I made during a few moments of intensely colorful light one late-season evening in the Yosemite backcountry. The physical location (high, with a clear line of sight to the western horizon) and the presence of wildfire smoke created intensely colorful light just as the sun set. It was one of those exhilarating photographic experiences when something quite unusual happens, but it is so transitory that one must act quickly and photograph almost without conscious thought. I was working quickly, relying on instinct, and trying to respond intuitively to the landscape and the changing light. (Having a lot of prior landscape photography under one’s belt helps a lot in situations like this!0

I suspect that the light in the photograph looks almost unreal. It seemed that way to me at the time, too! In this photograph the hazy quality of the atmosphere is more apparent — take a look between the darker trees and toward the more distant granite slope, where details are muted by this glowing haze.

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: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake

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Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake
A full autumn moon rises above Mono Lake at dusk.

Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A full autumn moon rises above Mono Lake at dusk.

There are still a few more photographs in this series of autumn evening images from Mono Lake that I made a few years ago. These come from that pandemic photographic genre that we might call “photographs that would have been lost forever if forced isolation had not given me a great reason to look through my old files.” (Maybe you have a shorter title?) I know I’m not the only one dong this. Travel has, of course, been complicated for a year and a half. I’ve been out, and I’ve even been to Mono Lake during this interval, but the opportunities seem greatly diminished. But there are tens of thousands of raw files in my archives, and it has been productive to spend time going back through them and discovering things I had left behind. (How that happens would be a great subject for a long post sometime.)

On this autumn evening I timed by arrival at Mono Lake for right around sunset. I knew that the full moon would rise over those distant mountains east of Mono Basin, and I expected that the moon world rise while there was still some light in the sky. This is ideal in many ways, since the remaining ambient light is often colorful, it illuminates landscape details, and it reduces the contrast between the bright moon and the darker scene. In several of the photographs —working very quickly! — I used a much longer focal length to enlarge the moon. But for this one I backed off and included much more of the surrounding landscape and 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, 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: Fall, Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Mono Lake Moonrise

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Mono Lake Moonrise
Early autumn full moon rising over Mono Lake, California.

Mono Lake Moonrise. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early autumn full moon rising over Mono Lake, California.

This is a photograph of that magical moment when an early-autumn full moon rises above the mountains to the east of Mono Lake while there is still a bit of sunset or early twilight light in the sky. I’ve experienced this here quite a few times, and I often time my arrival at this point for this hour when it is full moon time. On this evening it all worked out perfectly: intense color in the sky as the moon appeared, plus sky color reflected on the surface of the lake, interspersed with blue areas where surface turbulence broke up the reflection.

Photographing a full moon is a bit trickier than it might appear at first glance, especially if you want to include the landscape in the scene, too. Once it is dark or close to it, the difference between the light on the landscape and light of the moon is huge — the moon is essentially a daylight exposure, while that landscape is much darker. Even with a camera that had enough dynamic range to capture both of those extremes, you would either end up with a well-exposed moon and a nearly invisible landscape or a nicely exposed landscape and featureless white disk of a moon. One approach is to time the photograph so that the moon in in the sky before it is fully dark. Ideally, this means photographing the moon a bit before it is truly “full” — or photographing at a time of year when there is still light on the landscape when a truly full moon rises.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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.