Tag Archives: print

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Pond and Autumn Aspens, Evening

October 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A grove of autumn color aspens reflected in an eastern Sierra Nevada pond

I saved my visit to this place for the final evening of the final day of this year’s aspen hunt. Although I had passed by the mouth of this canyon four days earlier, while heading to another location near the start of my trip, I had only glanced in from the main highway — but I could tell, both from experience and from looking, that there would almost certainly be some good color here later on. Although the color change seemed to start on a rather early schedule this year, later on the pattern seemed to become closer to the norm. Color started high, and by the time I made this photograph a lot of the highest elevation color was going or gone. (Not all of it though — even amidst lots of bare trees up high, I still came across scattered high elevation groves full of color.)

As the color transition continues, it moves to successively lower elevations, and some of the most protected east-side canyons can hold color even longer. In the past this has often been a decent late season location for color, but I’ve also been there when the color came and went early, for reasons I could not decipher. So on this day when I actually entered the canyon for the first time this fall, I wondered if the colors that I could see along the stream where it emptied into larger valley below might be all there was… or if the color would continue up higher. It turned out that the colors did continue, and in outstanding form! The majority of the trees had fully or nearly fully changed color, with a few other trees at either end of the transition — some still all or mostly all green, and a few that had gone to bare trunks and branches. Far up the canyon there are flooded meadows, and I made this photograph at the highest of these ponds.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Green and Yellow Aspens

October 14, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A grove of green and yellow autumn aspen trees in the eastern Sierra Nevada

Since I just spent some days photographing autumn color in the Sierra Nevada, I’m going to interrupt the continuing series of early September Yosemite back-country photographs to share at least one of these recent autumn photographs. I began in the Tahoe area and this year I followed a path partly dictated by a fall color project that I’m working on, heading south through Hope Valley, then over Monitor Pass and continuing on the Bishop Creek area for a day of shooting before working my way back up into areas roughly around the intersection of routes 120 and 395 near Lee Vining.

As much as we all have “our places” to look for aspens, I was reminded again during this little jaunt that you can pretty much go anywhere in the Sierra or along its eastern slopes this time of year and quickly find tons of autumn color. I have a few favorites, indeed, and I understand that those just discovering the fall colors may want to go to “sure bet” places, but I’m having more and more fun just poking around and finding color in lots of odd little places. This location is very close to an area where many, many people were stopped to photograph some very spectacular color in a well-known place — but here, just a ways down the road, I was the only person shooting as cars whizzed past on their way to those other places.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Canyon, Haze

October 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon haze fills the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River

Westward flowing rivers, descending through deep canyons toward California’s Great Central Valley, are a major feature of the Sierra Nevada. Although one major river, the Kern, heads south and many smaller creeks take a short route down the eastern escarpment of the range, the gradual slope from the west means that the west side rivers often drain huge areas of the range and, though a combination of ancient glaciation and continuing river erosion, have cut many impressive canyons. Some are popular and frequently visited, such as Yosemite Valley and to a lesser extent Kings Canyon, but most of the others are not as well known.

On a hazy late afternoon I climbed the spine of some low granite ridges above the lake where we were camped and found myself looking directly down the course of the Tuolumne River as it makes its way through a deep and twisting canyon toward… sadly, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Fortunately, that abomination is not visible from this point, and instead the view is of a series of overlapping and receding ridges dropping to the bottom of the huge and remote canyon.

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Building Reflections

October 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Distorted reflections in windows of Chicago downtown towers

As I have mentioned in earlier Chicago posts, I like the way that Chicago’s more open urban design provides more opportunities to clearly see the many tall buildings, allow more light to get deeper down into the space, and makes the interactions between the buildings more visible. As with many of the others, I made this photograph from the Chicago River while on the architectural boat tour of the downtown area. This tour offers views of many, many of the downtown towers and other subjects, though it can be a bit tricky to photograph them — they do move past quickly and it is pretty much necessary to shoot handheld.

If I recall correctly (without taking the time to review the sequence of my raw files), I made this photograph somewhere along the south branch of the river, where there was a momentary juxtaposition of the lower building with its visible exterior framing and the much larger glass-encased building with its curving surface on the left side. If you look closely at the photograph you will notice that very little of what you see is the actual structure of buildings, aside from that external skeleton in the lower building and the narrow frames of the windows on the higher one. Virtually everything else in the photograph of the builds is arguably not the buildings but instead is some sort of distorted reflection of its surroundings.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: print

Pond and Autumn Aspens, Evening

Green and Yellow Aspens

Canyon, Haze

Building Reflections

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