Tag Archives: road

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Southern California

Backcountry Road, Desert Mountains

April 12, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Titus Canyon road twists through rugged desert landscape of Titanothere Canyon before climbing to its high point at Red Pass

I have driven through this desert back-country quite a few times during my visits to Death Valley National Park. This time was a bit different in two specific ways. First, in the past I have usually combined this route with an early morning shoot at a nearby location, shooting at this other location first, taking a breakfast break, and only then heading out on this drive. Consequently, I’ve always made the drive quite a bit later in the day when the light is much different – usually more hazy and with the sun higher in the sky. This time I started my day on this route, heading out just before dawn. Secondly, I made this a more leisurely passage. Sometimes in the past I have allowed myself to pass by too many portions of this region a bit too quickly, telling myself I had to move on in order to get to other things in time. This time I stopped a lot, and I often lingered at these stops for quite some time, poking around and looking for things to photograph that I might previously missed.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have sometimes found certain aspects of the desert terrain to be quite difficult to “see” as photographs. I think that the limited color palette has been one issue (often spanning the range from gray to tan!) as has the tendency for things to have a rather uniform appearance – often it is hard to find one central and prominent feature to focus on. In addition, for a photographer who has tended to work in places with water and greenery, the desert possess some different challenges. More than on some previous visits, this time I think I realized more that it is absolutely critical to slow down and adapt to the different pace and rhythms of this world. This time, rather than looking and deciding to move on, I stopped and looked some more. And as I did I began to see that there are more of the patterns and juxtapositions and forms that intrigue me than I had realized.

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

Aspen Grove, Old Road

November 7, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

An old dirt road winds into the heart of an aspen grove in full autumn color, Dixie National Forest, Utah

This is another of the “could have been anywhere” photographs, both because little scenes like this can be found all over the American West and because it is a scene that I simply happened to notice while passing by. So, the specific location is most certainly unimportant, though I’ll say that it was along a gravel road running through a section of the national forest in roughly the Zion/Cedar City area, a road that we had turned up more or less randomly and then explored for perhaps a couple of hours before turning back. The goal of that little drive had been to get into or as close as possible to some extensive forests of colorful aspen trees that we had seen from a distance. We succeeded.

There is something evocative on a number of levels about a simple scene like this one – with factors including the literal and subjective aspects of the changing season, the image of the small road disappearing into the grove as it wanders off to an unknown place, and the light of autumn filtered through the golden canopy of aspen leaves. If you don’t pay careful attention when you are there you might miss it, but the golden color suffuses the entire understory when the light is just right. (Photographers and painters may notice this sort of thing more than most people, since we/they are used to dealing with the otherwise blue coloration of the shadow light.) This sort of scene is extremely transitory. While we can permit ourselves to believe that both the green time of summer and the snowy time of winter are relatively permanent, no such illusion is possible during the brief span of literally a few days when the aspen color comes to these groves – they are different every day, and sometimes you can literally see the color going away as the wind blows down the leaves.

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

Utah Fall Color, Meadows

October 28, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Colorful autumn foliage of aspen and other trees near a meadow in the Dixie National Forest near Cedar City, Utah.

The opportunity to photograph this wild fall color resulted from the second “random ride” of the afternoon – with “random ride” being a family description of a drive that ends up going where no one would have predicted. After a brief afternoon visit to Cedar City, Utah to take care of some minor business involving coffee, we headed back up into the mountains to the east of town. Driving along, I spotted another road that branched off in a potentially promising direction, and without so much as a glance at the map I turned right and headed up a canyon.

Since I spotted some interesting color right away, and because the road looked like it would climb to elevations where I knew the color was good, I continued on it. The hunch paid off. As we ascended, wide open vistas appeared across a panorama ranging from south to north, and new and interesting colorful foliage continued to appear. We finally ended up at location where the road crossed one of the most colorful autumn foliage displays I have seen. After photographing a nearby grove of trees right above us, I turned my camera the other direction and found this composition that includes a wild assortment of colorful autumn trees (mostly but not entirely aspens) leading down to the edge of a small meadow.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Utah

Aspen Color Explosion

October 24, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

An almost unbelievable explosion of aspen color in the mountains east of Cedar City, Utah

This impresses me as just about the most ridiculous, over-the-top, unbelievable explosion of aspen color that I’ve ever seen. I visited Utah during the first part of October this year, and I encountered what must be almost peak fall aspen color during the first week of the month in the southwestern part of the state not far from Cedar City and Zion National Park. By the time I arrived the trees at the highest elevations had lost many of their leave, however the show from trees and somewhat lower elevations more than made up for this.

While there were colorful trees everywhere, this particular group seemed unrivaled for the sheet variety of colors packed together in one small area. The specific spot isn’t all that important and, frankly, in many ways the location was otherwise not necessarily the most wonderful example of Utah wilderness. (There were homes not too far away.) We came upon this scene while driving a back-road not far from Cedar City – we were basically just driving around looking for color and hoping we would find some. (Actually, it was hard to avoid seeing aspen color!) While some leaves had fallen from the lower portions of a few of these trees, the color variation was amazing – ranging from yellow-gold through orange and right on to red, with a few still-green leaves thrown in for good measure.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: road

Backcountry Road, Desert Mountains

Aspen Grove, Old Road

Utah Fall Color, Meadows

Aspen Color Explosion

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