Tag Archives: print

Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Pilings and Water, Night

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Pilings and Water, Night - Pilings along the waterfront photographed at night, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.
Pilings along the waterfront photographed at night, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.

Pilings and Water, Night. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. March 3, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pilings along the waterfront photographed at night, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.

This is another photography from my nighttime visit to the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard with friends from The Nocturnes in early March of this year. The subject here includes some old and worn pilings along the edge of a ship launching ramp and the still water smoothed by the long exposure necessary to photograph here at night.

This particular spot only recently became accessible (at least without jumping a bunch of cyclone fences or getting someone to open the gate) when waterfront access was created near the ship yard museum. An area that had formerly been off-limits was opened to provide a way to get to the edge of the water, and this path parallels this ramp and the extensive structures alongside. In this photograph I made a color balancing choice that is a bit unusual for me when it comes to night photography in general and shooting at Mare Island in particular. One of the things that I enjoy about the night photography environment at Mare Island is that there are many different types of lighting, each having different color characteristics. Some are merely warmish “tungsten” like colors, others are garish yellows and greens, a few are blue, and the wash of light from nearby Vallejo and even the natural light of the moon can enter the mix. Because of this, I often simply go with the wild colors of the environment here. This scene is lit by grossly yellow sodium vapor lamps, and the “natural” coloration of the scene is quite intensely saturated. For this image I decided to color adjust this much closer to what might be regarded as a more neutral light color.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Two Trillium Blossoms

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Two Trillium Blossoms - Two trillium blossoms in the redwood forests of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California
Two trillium blossoms in the redwood forests of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California

Two Trillium Blossoms. Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California. March 10, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two trillium blossoms in the redwood forests of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California.

It is probably obvious by now that I’m a trillium fanatic. Early March is “trillium season” in the redwood forests around the San Francisco Bay Area, so I have been out photographing these flowers during the past couple of weeks. I was originally concerned that this might be a very poor year for them since we are in the midst of a serious drought in California, but some early March rain seems to have provided enough water to get them to sprout. In fact, this past weekend I saw lots of new plants just starting to emerge, so it seems to me that there may be some life left in the this year’s bloom. (And now we are looking hopefully at an upcoming week of much-needed rain.)

I photographed this pair along a trail that traverses a hillside above a valley filled with coast redwoods. I arrived in this spot just as morning light was beginning to filter down through the tall canopy of this forest and, in spots, hit the ground and the new plants. The trick is is to get some of the brighter color of this sunlight but to avoid the direct sun – the latter is far too harsh for photographing these flowers. So I worked in the shaded areas or, at times, in those spots that were right on the sun/shade boundary. I probably most often photograph single flowers, but when I can find a group I like to see how I can make a composition out of them. It is a bit trickier than it might seem, as there are a bunch of elements that must work together. First, the two flowers need to be fairly close together, and they both need to be at roughly the same point in their development – it isn’t so wonderful to get one beautiful flower and one half-dead, dried hulk. Then they must both be illuminated in roughly the same way – it won’t work so well if one is in brighter light than the other. The background is a tricky thing, too. If it is too bright or too busy (or too well focused) it can easily distract from the flowers themselves, so I usually look for something in shadow and without any very bright objects. While I may be able to find a camera position that accomplishes this, sometimes I need to move a small, bright leaf or twig. And once all of this is worked out, the flowers must be roughly in a plane parallel to the camera’s sensor so that both will be in focus – and this must happen while shooting at the large apertures necessary to throw the background out of focus. And last, but not least, exposure can be slightly tricky – it is very easy to over-expose the bright but delicate form of the flower’s petals, and end up losing detail.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

Morning Clouds, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay

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Morning Clouds, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay - Light shining through layers of morning clouds over San Francisco Bay silhouettes the hills of Angel Island near Richardson Bay.
Light shining through layers of morning clouds over San Francisco Bay silhouettes the hills of Angel Island near Richardson Bay.

Morning Clouds, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Marin County, California. March 10, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Light shining through layers of morning clouds over San Francisco Bay silhouettes the hills of Angel Island near Richardson Bay.

I can be a bit of a creature of habit when it comes to shooting in certain locations that I’m very familiar with. But the habit isn’t so much shooting the same thing – though that can be part of it – as it is being attentive to how the familiar thing might present itself in ways I have not previously seen. This photograph is a case in point.

I was on my way to a location north of the Golden Gate where I frequently photograph, so I know the route well and have a routine that I frequently follow – it involves where I’m heading, what time I plan to get there, and the route I typically follow. Along the way there are several places where I almost always pause long enough to look around and see if a familiar scene might look different. At a location where my route follows a short ridge line, I often stop and look back across Richardson Bay towards Angel Island and, beyond that, the waterfront of Oakland and then the East Bay hills. On this recent morning, a weak weather front was washing out as it arrived in the Bay Area and, as a result, there were many layers of clouds stacked up to the east. While the sun was able to shine through and light the surface of San Francisco Bay beyond the boats anchored in Richardson Bay, there was haze in the atmosphere that obscured details even on relatively close Angel Island, and in the sky above and beyond there were layers of fog, lower clouds, and the highest clouds of the weather front.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Tree Farm and Hills

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Tree Farm and Hills - The bare winter trunks of a tree farm against a backdrop of low hills, Skagit Valley, Washington
The bare winter trunks of a tree farm against a backdrop of low hills, Skagit Valley, Washington

Tree Farm and Hills. February 19, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The bare winter trunks of a tree farm against a backdrop of low hills, Skagit Valley, Washington.

This is perhaps a bit of a subtle photograph. While shooting in the Skagit Valley of Washington, my brother Richard and I took a break from photographing trumpeter swans and snow geese and went looking for bald eagles, which hang out nearby in large numbers. We eventually found several of them in various trees in the area, including in the upper branches of these large groves of trees that I think may be poplars that are part of a tree farm. (Our first attempt with the eagles was a classic. We saw a beautiful bird in a tree at the edge of the grove right alongside the road. We stopped. We carefully fitted the right long lenses. We got out. We aimed… and the eagle flew away.)

While standing around looking for the birds I was fascinated by the regular patters of these very slender and closely spaced trees in the tree farms that were along the road. The light was very muted due to overcast, and the trees themselves don’t provide a whole lot of light/dark contrast. I found a section of the grove that I liked and then worked my position so that I could get the diagonal of the more distant and out of focus ridge to cut across the background and angle down to the right.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.