Tag Archives: rock

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

Oak Leaves, Reflections, Spring

March 23, 2015 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Autumn oak leaves, reflections of sky and sandstone cliffs on stained rock

This was a wonderful autumn day of exploration, re-visiting a familiar place, wandering with friends, and photography. We drove a short distance down a back-country road from our campsite to get to the start of a canyon, beginning in a spot where there is little in the surrounding landscape to indicate what is hidden here. We left our vehicles on the flats at the edge of a shallow valley and dropped into it. The valley quickly narrowed and it wasn’t long until sandstone walls towered above as we traced the meandering course of the stream that had cut this canyon. We travelled slowly, making detours as the spirit took us, and halting to concentrate on photographic subjects we discovered along the way.

Eventually we arrived at a sort of “half-subway” (referencing a well-known Utah landscape subject that is far from this spot) where the creek rounded a bend in a narrow section of the canyon and has cut away rock back underneath the overhead walls. At the lower end of this section we arrived at a wider flat area, though the canyon was still quite narrow, and we paused to eat, talk, make photographs, and ponder. Across the bend in the creek a smooth rock wall dropped down from beneath a thickly vegetated ledge to the banks of the creek, and water seeped from cracks below the ledge, providing enough water to keep the rock constantly damp, and autumn leaves from an oak tree on the ledge were scattered on the rock.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Red Rock, Dusk

March 20, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dusk light on sandstone formations, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

On our first day in this part of southern Utah last October we settled into our primitive camp, hung out for a while, and then headed off to an area of beautifully formed sandstone in the late afternoon, where we planned to do our evening photography. When we arrived the sun was still well above the ridge to our west but its light was intermittently muted by thin clouds that softened the contrasts between light and shadow. For perhaps a couple of hours we worked this landscape of carved red rock, with its gullies, ridges, sand-filled flats, holes and every curving shape and texture you can imagine.

There was much to see, and after I photographed the most obvious subjects I continued to look and began to see less obvious features. As the sun dropped behind the ridge and shadows stretched across this area I first felt a kind of urgency to make photographs while the light was still good. I continued shooting right into the post-sunset dusk hour, when color came to the thin clouds and washed this landscape, already red from rocks and blue from haze, with intense reddish-purple light. I made a series of photographs in this area above a carved sandstone gully, and soon it was too dark to shoot any more. I/we looked up from our cameras, enjoyed the quiet for a few moments, then put on headlamps and found our way across rocks and back to where we started and then drove back to camp.

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

Juniper, Boulder, Cliff

January 12, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small juniper tree grows next to a sandstone boulder at the bottom of a cliff, Capitol Reef National Park

I’m digging back into the October Utah photographs yet again for this one. It comes from Capitol Reef National Park, where I spent about three days out of a longer visit to Utah. I started in far southwest Utah, wandered a bit in the Vermillion Cliffs area, followed a back road north to highway 12, then headed over Boulder Mountain to the Park, where I met a friend and got a campsite for a few days.

I’m gradually pushing out the boundaries of my knowledge of this park, and part of that growth on this trip involved shooting in some tricky light. On this late afternoon, between some other subjects, we ended up in a well-traveled canyon as the tall canyon walls and some cloudiness softened the light. After reaching our furthest point in the canyon we turned around and started back, and as we passed back through one twisting section we saw several interesting photographic possibilities, stopped, and spent a bit of time looking and photographing. This small juniper tree stood in front of an old red rock boulder, and the green of the tree and red of the rock complemented one another. I was also fascinated by the complex, angled, and sometimes-curving patterns on the vertical cliff wall in the background.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Mount Humphreys, Dawn

January 5, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This photograph is from a spectacular landscape in the eastern Sierra above the town of Bishop, in what is sometimes called “Buttermilk Country,” or just plain “the Buttermilks.” Here the land rises steadily from the Owens Valley lowlands, first gradually, then building into the eroded and rounded rocky hills like those catching the sun in the center of this photograph, and finally culminating in the alpine peaks of the Sierra Nevada Crest. The tallest peak in the photograph is Mount Humphreys.

As is typical in autumn, I was in the eastern Sierra to photograph fall color — which mostly means aspens. My recollection is that we started up toward the mountains from Bishop very early in the morning, before sunrise, and then decided that the dawn light on the eastern face of the Sierra offered more possibilities than yet more aspen photographs — besides, the aspens would still be there after this sunrise light was gone! We left the main road and followed gravel tracks to this spot with its view of foreground hills and Sierra crest peaks just as the dawn light show began.

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.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: rock

Oak Leaves, Reflections, Spring

Red Rock, Dusk

Juniper, Boulder, Cliff

Mount Humphreys, Dawn

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