Tag Archives: red

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Distant Ridge, Dusk

Image February 16, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A distant ridge in dusk light, viewed from a high point in Death Valley Naitonal Park.

This was just about the final photograph that I made at this location high in Death Valley National Park’s Black Mountains. I had arrived here well before sunset, remaining to photograph the light transitions as the day came to an end. The valleys directly below had gone dark by this point, so I quickly moved to a nearby spot and switched my attention from the west to the east, where a distant snow-capped ridge in Nevada was visible beneath the dusk sky.

In a previous post I mentioned that landscape photography isn’t always a slow, sedate process. It can be, but the light, sky, and landscape can also change very quickly. When I saw this late light I had to switch into “fast landscape” mode as the light quickly faded, and I managed to make a couple of exposures before the show was over and it was time to head back to camp.

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: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Before Sunrise, Central Valley

Image January 15, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter pre-sunrise sky and clouds above wetlands and trees, Central Valley, California.

Yes, I know. That color is too saturated to be real, right? But this is actually what we saw on the winter morning in California’s Central Valley. (I’ll share another photograph of the scene in a few days that will include some regular old blue sky for reference.) It just happened that the conditions were precisely right to create an unbelievably colorful pre-sunrise sky above the Sierra for a short time.

While the possibility of something like this wasn’t entirely unforeseeable, when we headed out a half hour earlier in near-darkness it certainly did not look likely. After the previous cloudy day, it looked like the sky was still covered, and it was almost a half hour later when we reached the edge of those clouds and found the sky more open to the east that we started to see hints of this light. It was like this for a short period before sunrise, and with the rising sun the intensity of the colors quickly diminished.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: People

Waiting for Sunrise

Image January 10, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Four people await sunrise in California’s Central Valley.

Waking up in the darkness, perhaps many hours before sunrise, strikes many people as being somewhere between barbaric and impossible. They literally cannot imagine themselves doing it, and perhaps they never have gotten up early enough to watch the first light appear. The odd thing is that most of us who do get up “that early” understand that the reward of watching sunrise makes the discomfort well worth it. In fact, it seems to us that NOT getting up for sunrise is the tragedy.

This was an exceptionally brilliant pre-sunrise experience, though it did not last long at all. In fact, friends of ours who arrived only a little later found the skies mostly gray. But the clouds in the east, leading out toward the Sierra crest, where as brilliantly colorful as I have ever seen them.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Sunset Fog and Clouds

Image December 22, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Sunset fog and clouds above an Eastern Sierra Nevada lake after a storm.

As I do my year-end traverse of photographs from the preceding year I often find things that were left behind. This is one of those photographs. It comes from a weeklong backcountry photographic sojourn in the Eastern Sierra with a group of friends/photographers. We set up a basecamp and photographed the heck out of our surroundings during that week, devoting more time to the area than we could on a typical point-to-point backpacking trip.

Since I’ve told the story here before, I’ll keep it short — but we lived through the worst summer rain storm I’ve experienced in the Sierra. Twenty-four hours later the storm finally cleared late in the day, and this bit of late sunset light lit up the layers of clouds and fog to the east. It was an astonishing evening, and my photographs individually contain only parts of the remarkable whole.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: red

Distant Ridge, Dusk

Before Sunrise, Central Valley

Waiting for Sunrise

Sunset Fog and Clouds

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