Tag Archives: rain

Photographs: Arizona, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: The Southwest

Rain Squall, Monument Valley

November 14, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Distant mesas and towers of Monument Valley, veiled by a passing rain squall

I have a bit of a surprising confession to make. Utah is not the only state in the American Southwest that I had not previously photographed. Although I have been in the state before, I had never photographed there prior to this year, when we made a quick pass though the upper portion of the state on a drive between Moab and Zion National Park. Several things explain this. First, as I’ve written before, I’ve long been a California landscape bigot – the “local” landscapes of ocean and mountains and deserts and redwoods and more have been, and continue to be, such a focus that I’ve felt little inclination to shoot elsewhere. More recently, as I discovered Utah, I felt a bit of an obligation to avoid Arizona for certain other reasons that I won’t go into right now.

That’s right. I’ve never photographed the Grand Canyon. In fact, I haven’t even seen the Grand Canyon except from the air while flying over the state. And, no, I had not seen Monument Valley either. As we left Moab and headed south, I was excited about seeing this new landscape, but a bit concerned about the potential for photography as a storm – and not just the afternoon monsoon – was moving through. Sure enough, just about the time we got near to Monument Valley the clouds thickened, the wind blew, and it began to rain in earnest. However, I soon caught sight of the towers and mesas of this valley in the distance, familiar from so many photographs I’ve seen, and I quickly realized that the rainy conditions were actually going to provide some very special light and effects. This photograph is a case in point. It was cloudy but not raining at my camera position. Just beyond, a passing squall was dropping rain across the desert terrain and muting and blurring the features, but beyond that the sun was shining on the stupendous distant formations, and beyond them broken clouds were moving.

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

Snow Geese and Farm Buildings

March 19, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Snow geese fly low past a Skagit Valley farm, Washington.

Back in February I was fortunate to be able to spend a day photographing migratory (and other) birds in the lower Skagit Valley area in the state of Washington. For me the primary draw was the snow geese, since I had just spent several days photographing Ross’s geese in California’s Central Valley, along with the beautiful trumpeter swans that hang out in the fields in this part of Washington. I had also been alerted to the presence of bald eagles in the area.

I drove up very early in the day from the Seattle area, arriving at just about the time that would have been sunrise… if it had not been a typical gray Washington day. I passed through a small town by the highway and then headed out into this farm country, immediately spotting scattered groups of trumpeter swans, whose large white bodies stand out clearly against the intense green of the new growth in the fields. However, all of these birds were too far from the roads, so I moved on, soon passing what looked like a country produce stand in front of a fallow field that where there were some geese. I stopped – and immediately heard that striking sound of the huge flocks of geese – and got out my camera gear to see what I could do. At this point I looked around a bit more and saw flock after flock of birds high in the sky to the west and heading this direction. Very soon all of these flocks began land on this very field where I had fortuitously stopped and in minutes there were tens of thousands of geese on the ground and many more flying routes above and around the field.

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

Dogwood Leaves, Spring

January 4, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

New spring dogwood leaves after morning rain along Crane Flat Road, Yosemite National Park.

There is a grove of dogwood trees along highway 120 into Yosemite, between the park entrance and the valley, where I stop several times each seasons. Most recently I stopped there on a quiet autumn evening this past October when the dogwood leaves were turning fall colors. Much earlier in the season I stop to see and photograph the dogwood flowers. I made this photograph several years ago on my first visit to the grove that season, on a rainy morning when the leaves had emerged and the flowers were in bloom.

While the flowers were the main reason I visited the grove on this morning, it turned out that the flower photographs were less interesting, in some ways, than the photographs I made of the leaves of the dogwood trees and of other newly sprouted plants. Not only where the plants young and fresh and green, but the soft light and the drops of water from the light rain intensified the colors and made the light less harsh.

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

Thunderstorm Over Barney Lake

September 2, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Rain from an afternoon thunderstorm begins to fall above Barney Lake, in the eastern Sierra Nevada near Mammoth Lakes, California.

This is yet another older photograph that I found again while reviewing nearly a decade of raw files recently. I actually have previously posted another similar photograph of this scene in the past, but I think this one is also effective and is somewhat different.

I came to this lake when I had to leave a group of friends with whom I was about four days into a 14-day backpacking trip in the central Sierra back in 2005. On day four I woke up feeling less that great and thought I might be coming down with some sort of “bug” that I didn’t want to deal with in the back-country, partly because we were about to enter a section of trail with no quick and easy way out, and also because I didn’t want to take a chance on slowing down or halting the rest of my party. So I bailed out on the morning of day five. The rest of the gang went south on the John Muir Trail while I backtracked to the north and exited over Duck Pass.

I recall the day fairly well – perhaps because I travelled the trail twice in two days! It was easy hiking back along the JMT to the turnoff to the pass, where I paused to enjoy the view of Duck Lake. As I began the ascent to the pass above the lake, thunderstorms quickly developed, and I recall being surprised when the rain started much more quickly and much sooner than I had predicted. I believe I had to duck (no pun intended) beneath a nearby tree and quickly take out rain gear and pack cover before moving on in the rain. After I crossed the pass and started the descent towards Mammoth Lakes, the storm moved elsewhere and rays of light broke over Barney Lake below the pass where I paused to make a few photographs of this light against the backdrop of more distant peaks and falling rain.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: rain

Snow Geese and Farm Buildings

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Dogwood Leaves, Spring

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Thunderstorm Over Barney Lake

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

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