Tag Archives: rock

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Point Sur, Sunlit Ocean

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Point Sur, Sunlit Ocean
“Point Sur, Sunlit Ocean” — Point Sur is silhouetted against the brilliantly bright sunlit ocean

Point Sur is one of the most striking landmarks along the rugged Big Sur coastline south of Monterey, California. There is plenty of striking and remarkable seascape and landscape here, but this feature is pretty much unique. It consists of a rocky, rounded hill right at the edge of the ocean, and it is (barely) connected to the mainland by a narrow, sandy peninsula. (I often wonder how many times the peninsula has been overridden by tsunami waves over the millennia.)

The spot also has a long human history. Over a century ago a lighthouse was established on Point Sur, and since it was so isolated — there was no Pacific Coast Highway back then — the residents had to be essentially self-reliant. The lighthouse workers were let go decades ago when automated lights replaced the old lighthouses, but the place is still there and much of it has been restored. I am in the area often, but the view changes a lot, and this time I photographed it from hills to the north as giant waves approached the coast and the brilliant sun glinted on the surface of the Pacific Ocean

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Patterned Cliff Face, Detail

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Patterned Cliff Face, Detail
A small section of shaded Sierra Nevada cliff reveals remarkable details of dikes, fractures, color, and stains

Patterned Cliff Face, Detail. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small section of shaded Sierra Nevada cliff reveals remarkable details of dikes, fractures, color, and stains

Most often when I think of large rocky faces in the Sierra Nevada, the clean, smooth, and almost uniform faces of Yosemite granite come to mind — large expanses of nearly unbroken rock shaped by glaciers. However, when I get into the high country and the other areas of the range I am reminded that things aren’t quite so simple. In places you can find mountains cut through by giant dikes of non-granite rock, or you might encounter the remnants of more ancient layers that lay above the granite intrusions and today give us red, black and other colors of material.

Since I’m no geologist, I can’t explain the details of the face in this photograph, but I can share a few observations. It is the headwall of a high bowl that contains a subalpine lake, and the area does show signs of glaciation. The fact is gigantic, and this is just a small section. It is far from uniform, with mostly gray rock cut through by thick intrusions of lighter material, and the whole thing cracked and fractured. In many places the surface has been deeply stained as water has flowed or seeped across it.

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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 and Amazon.
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Trees, Granite, Reflections

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Trees, Granite, Reflections
A granite outcropping and trees reflected in the surface of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake

Trees, Granite, Reflections. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A granite outcropping and trees reflected in the surface of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake

This scene was along the edge of a lake I visited on several evenings, hiking up from our base camp during our September week in the Eastern Sierra Nevada backcountry to make photographs. The logical starting point for photographs here was near the lakes outlet, where there was a small, rocky meadow and several nice granite outcroppings that extended into the lake. I initially began by photographing there.

But soon the light left that area and I decided to wander around a bit more. Not far away was a small bay extending off from the main body of the lake, and on the other side of this bay several attractively twisted and bent trees stood on and in front of a large granite outcropping.

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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 and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Fractured Rock

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Fractured Rock
Detail of a fractured rock wall in the John Muir Wilderness

Fractured Rock. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Detail of a fractured rock wall in the John Muir Wilderness

There are quite a few “photographer jokes” that you’ll hear if you hang out long enough with these folks. (I should make a list sometime!) Some of them come up in answer to the common question, “What did you photograph?” (A variation on, “What are you photographing?” and not totally unrelated to, “Did you get anything good?”) In a lot of cases, when asked the “what did you photograph?” question, you have choices: given a long answer (often the truest response) and make your questioner wish they hadn’t brought it up, give a very short superficial answer, or make a joke. One joke answer among some folks I know and sometimes photograph with is a cheery, “Rocks, water, and trees!”

If you have been watching recent photographs from this location in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, you may be forgiven for noting that in some cases I seem to have been reducing the subjects from “rocks, water, and trees” down to the minimal, “rocks…” This is — obviously! — one such example. It is the sort of thing that most folks would probably not see, since it wasn’t in an obvious place and is in a location where you could easily walk past while looking at other, larger things. But I wasn’t looking for the obvious, at least not only for the obvious, so I stopped here and poked around a bit, discovering a small section on a larger rock fact where the remnants of an old layer of pink rock were gradually breaking away from the underlying gray material. One more thing — when I make a photograph like this one, focusing on some compositional aspect of some small and non-iconic thing, I often think of the photographs of Mike Osborne, one of the original “First Light” photographers and a person with a unique and wonderful way of “seeing” the Sierra Nevada landscape.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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 and Amazon.
Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.