Tag Archives: post

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Post-Storm Clouds

Image September 29, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

No, I am still not quite finished with this spectacular evening in the Sierra backcountry. In early August our group spent a week base-camped in the wilderness, heading out each day (starting before sunrise and concluding after dark) to photograph our spectacular surroundings. We experienced challenging weather during the first 24 hours, but on the evening of the second day the storm dissipated, and just at sunset things opened up and alpenglow briefly lit up the sky.

There was no guarantee of this happening — which is often the case when chasing such subjects. Not long before this things were pretty gray, and fog drifted just overhead, obscuring trees and peaks, al though we could see that the sky was lightening up a bit. Then a bit of pink showed up on the higher clouds, gradually working its way down though the various layers left by the departing storm. I had been photographing the fog, but I quickly turned my attention to this developing scene! As the sky became more and more colorful, a bank of lighter fog enveloped the top of a ridge on the other side of the valley beyond the lake. A few minutes after this spectacular finale… the show was over.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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

Burned Forest

Image July 14, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A Yosemite National Park forest beginning its post-wildfire recovery..

This photograph comes from Yosemite National Park, and not far from the current wildfire in the Mariposa Grove area. There are “good fires” and “bad fires” — the former tend to burn loose stuff on the forest floor along with some small trees and other plants, while the later burn hot and climb into the crowns of the trees and often killing them. Most of the trees in a healthy forest will survive the good fires, but increasingly the forests are now faced with bad fires that cause tremendous destruction. A quick scan around this photograph reveals some dead young trees but also some remaining green branches that likely mark a tree that is going to survive.

Photographing wildfire sites has long been a challenge for me. Many years ago I simply regarded wildfires as evil, but today my view is more nuanced, and I accept that some fire occurs in healthy forests and, in fact, is necessary and good. The challenge photographically has been to see these scenes as being subjects for beautiful photography rather than just as destruction.

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

A Forest After Fire

Image September 15, 2020 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

For obvious reasons, wildfire has been on my mind a lot during the past few weeks. Back in August a spectacular and extremely unusual series of electrical storms rolled across the San Francisco Bay Area, touching off scores of small fires that soon merged into three very large and very destructive infernos. Since that time we’ve lived in a pall of smoke around here. I briefly escaped — or so I thought — to the Eastern Sierra, with plans for a short pack trip… the weekend that the huge Creek Fire started south of Yosemite. Since that time the entire west coast has been afflicted by historically awful fires.

I’m familiar with wildfires in California, for one reason from years of late-summer and early-autumn backpacking. Some smoke is common at this time of year, most often continuing on into the very beginning of October when the first rains often arrive. Long ago I reconciled myself — after years of Smoky the Bear exposure — to the idea that some fire is a natural and beneficial part of the natural environment. But it has been harder to find photographic beauty in fire-scarred landscapes. This scene merges those two notions. This forest had been burned in a management fire a year or two earlier, scorching the lower trunks of these trees and consuming some excess litter. But when I made the photograph the forest was again looking quite healthy, albeit with visible signs of the fire remaining.

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History, Morning Musings, Site News

Over 6000 Posts!

Image February 9, 2019 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

*Golden Gate Bridge. July 3, 2005. © Copyright Dan Mitchell — the first photograph posted at the G Dan Mitchell website.*

As I was setting up today’s photograph (it will appear shortly) I happened to notice that I just passed 6000 posts on this blog! I had been posting photographs for a while before that on other blogs (for example, the old “Dan’s Outside,” which focused on backcountry adventures, and my teaching websites which date to the mid-1990s), but back in 2005 I decided to start a blog dedicated to photography.

The first post here (the obligatory “It Worked!” post) was on July 10, 2005. It was followed by a post explaining the plan to start sharing photographs on the web in a more organized fashion. The first photographic post came on July 16 of that year — it was the black and white image of the Golden Gate Bridge in fog shown above.

At first the posts were a bit irregular. Sometimes I posted several in one day. Other times there were gaps of several days between new posts. On August 16, 2005 the first string of daily photographs appeared, though there were still breaks when I was in the field for a few days or longer. (Posting photographs remotely was not so simple back then!) But I’ve been continuously posting new photographs here since the end of that month in 2005! Believe it or not, that is approximately 5000 daily photographs posted at this blog!

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