Tag Archives: print

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

Red and Yellow Leaves, Sandstone Wall

February 8, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Brilliant red and yellow autumn leaves of oak and red leaf maple against a backdrop of layered and fractured sandstone, Zion National Park

I suppose that I have to be honest and admit that the main reason for making this photograph was the absolutely ridiculous and gaudy colors in this little bit of red rock canyon. You can find red trees in this area, and you can find yellow trees, but it isn’t often that you (or I, anyway) find this combination of leaves, packed so tightly together, and against the intense color of the sandstone wall.

We had probably driven past this spot a few times before we finally came back and pulled over and photographed it. I can’t speak for the others in my group, but in some ways it is almost a bit embarrassing to point a camera at something so colorful and photograph it… just because it is colorful. Compositionally it was a very tricky thing to shoot. The only feature that brings much relief to the shades of red, yellow, and orange is the single arching crack leading up from right to left.

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

Colorado River, Dead Horse Point

February 6, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The canyon of the Colorado River, from Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah

The light was a bit tricky when we drove out to Dead Horse Point to look at the famous view of the Colorado River as it loops below huge cliffs at the edge of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. It was nearing the middle of the day, so the soft morning and evening light was nowhere to be found. It was also hazy, with the slightly opaque air taking on distinctly blue colors. For all of these reasons, and also perhaps as a nod to old school landscape photography, I went with a black and white rendition of this photograph.

This is a truly remarkable bit of terrain. First, in the bottom of the canyon the Colorado River negotiates and abrupt horseshoe bend here beneath the tall cliffs leading up to the “Island in the Sky” portion of Canyonlands National Park. Above the river are a series of huge terraces form as the river eroded its way though the deep and old layers of sedimentary rock that characterize this area. Shooting with a slightly long focal length, I was able to eliminate most extraneous subjects and crop tightly around this area of massive cliffs and terraces.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

The Cranes Return, Evening

February 5, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The sandhill cranes return to the marshes of the San Joaquin Valley at dusk on a mid-winter evening.

For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, the evening return of the sandhill cranes is one of the magical things among a host of magical things about central California’s winter migratory bird population. I think I was primed to regard these birds this way by reading about them many years ago, though I never quite new what sandhill cranes actually were and I presumed that they were only found in far-off places. Then when I first began to photograph birds seriously – which was only a few years ago – one of my first encounters with the winter bird popular involved finding sandhill cranes in fields south of Sacramento. Then, perhaps last winter, there was an evening at a wildlife refuge in the Central Valley when I was photographing geese with a small group of friends. There had been many, many Ross’s geese around that evening and as dusk approached the goose photography gradually came to an end as the geese departed. After the intense focus of shooting those birds, once they were gone we sort of looked up and realized that the sun was gone and that the world was quieting down. It seemed like the show was over. And then I heard a sound from over the trees to the southeast, a sound I now immediately recognize as the distinctive call of the cranes, and within moments huge flocks of these birds began to coast overhead and look for landing spots.

That is now how I expect to see them – at some point during the dusk period when most everything else has started to quiet down, the cranes appear. Their sound is a distinct contrast with the wild and raucous cackling of the geese, an altogether calmer and quieter call. And their mode of flight is also different. While the geese often launch loudly into the sky in huge, flapping clouds, the cranes coast in slowly and rather quietly, often in long lines, and their motion is slower and smoother. On this evening, at a point when there was barely enough light left to make photographs, they appeared to my left and crossed in front of me with the western dusk sky as a backdrop.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Wildlife

Two Trumpeter Swans in Flight

February 4, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A pair of trumpeter swans in flight above Skagit Valley farmland on a cloudy and rainy day, Washington

I had about four or five hours in the Skagit Valley area of Washington in the beginning of December, after the tasks I had gone to Washington for were completed early. I drove up from the Seattle area in the rain, and it was still cloudy, windy, and rainy when I arrived – just what one might expect in December in the Pacific Northwest! The last time I had been there, a year ago, I had encountered amazing flocks of snow geese in a field near the road not far from where it rises to cross the river, and my first thought was that I’d see if this was a regular event or if I had just been lucky the previous year. I must have been lucky! This time there was not a goose to be seen, at least at first, at this location.

Given this development, I decided to poke around on some back roads in the area and see if I could get close enough to trumpeter swans to photograph them with my meager little 200mm focal length lens – about half the length of what I would usually use for this sort of subject. By moving carefully, using my car as a blind, and sitting quietly and waiting, I was able to get a few close shots of the swans in a field. I soon figured out that they would occasionally lift off and fly to another nearby field where there were other swans, so I positioned myself (in the car) between the two flocks and settled in to see what would happen. Sure enough, before long groups of two or more swans started to fly my direction and pass close to the car, usually rising a bit as they passed over. This pair made a bit of a turn around me, so I photographed them against the cloud-filled sky.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: print

Red and Yellow Leaves, Sandstone Wall

Colorado River, Dead Horse Point

The Cranes Return, Evening

Two Trumpeter Swans in Flight

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