Tag Archives: rocky

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Southern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Cook Bank Ruins, Rhyolite

January 21, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The ruins of the Cook Bank in the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada, with barren desert hills under a pre-sunrise sky.

This was the closest to the winter solstice that I’ve visited Rhyolite, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by several things. First, the sun came up not only later, but also a bit further south along the horizon – and the light that would usually strike these ruins at sunrise was blocked for a while by a large hill that sits next to the town. Second, it was cold! Third, no one else was there at sunrise! This is a bit unusual since in the Death Valley high season (which arrives a bit later in the year), Rhyolite can be a pretty popular place… for a ghost town… in the middle of the desert… in Nevada. :-)

Because I have photographed here several times before and for the reasons mentioned above, I took a bit of a different approach to photographing the place this time. The winter light, some high clouds, and the different point along the horizon of the sun rise meant that the light was quite different from what I’ve occasionally had to work with in the past. At first I was a bit disappointed to realize that the direct dawn light was not going to strike the old Cook Bank and other nearby buildings. But when some clouds to the east obscured the direct light and high, thin overhead clouds begin to pick up color and fill in the shadows, I saw that other interesting lighting was going to make up for it. At the moment that I made this photograph, those clouds to the east (right) of my position beautifully softened what might otherwise have been some stark and harsh light on the pinnacles beyond the town. They also created an unusual and beautiful quality of light for a few moments – a reddish-pink quality from the light reflected from the clouds but with a few soft quality.

I decided to shoot from a distance with a long lens so as to control the position of the ruins against the background hills, and the longer focal length makes these hills more prominent than they would be if I shot the building with a shorter focal length from a closer position. This also allowed me to more carefully eliminate some distracting elements that invariably appear at old sites like this. (The first times I visited, access to most of the ruins was quite unimpeded. Now fences have been erected around some of them. Part of me regrets the loss of access, but the greater part of me understands that this will allow these buildings to be around longer so that more people will get to see them. I stayed behind the fences.) If you look around on the web a bit, you can find some wonderful old photographs of this town when it was a bustling place with thousands of residents, and when the Cook Bank was a very impressive and modern-for-the-time building.

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: Sierra Nevada

East Side of Bishop Pass

January 8, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Trail and meadows below the east side of Bishop Pass, eastern Sierra Nevada range.

This photograph comes from about a dozen years ago. I recently came across it while sorting through older photograph files for a variety of reasons – general clearing out of old images, searching for photographs of a particular subject for a client, and seeing what older images I might have missed when I first made them. When I saw this photograph it evoked a whole series of fun recollections.

Nearly weeks earlier, I had begun a two-week-long backpack trip along a section of the John Muir Trail. At that time, the only section of the JMT that I had not hiked (at least once!) was an area between approximately Shadow Lake and the Muir Trail Ranch – and this was to be the trip on which I covered this remaining bit of trail. The trip started just fine, though in some territory that is not exactly my favorite portion of the range – the low areas around Devils Postpile. After passing by that national monument we headed south, passing Duck Lake and camping at Purple Lake.

The next morning I woke up feeling a bit under the weather, an unusual experience for me on the trail. The next leg of the trip was to take us through an area without an easy exit, and I became concerned about what would happen if my “feeling poorly” deteriorated into actually being sick. I reluctantly decided to leave my group to continue without me, and I backtracked over Duck Pass and down into the Mammoth Lakes area and headed home. (Ironically, by the time I got out I was feeling fine…)

Ending a trip this way just didn’t feel right, so I hatched a plan to show up and run into my friends on the last day of their trip. Since they were coming out over Bishop Pass, I crossed that pass into beautiful Dusy Basin a day earlier, and on the next morning hiked down the canyon so that I could be casually sitting on a rock as they came up the trail from LeConte Canyon. I have rarely seen people as surprised as they were when they found me! After our reunion and joining them for their last trail night, the next morning we were up early to hike out over Bishop Pass. This photograph was made shortly after we crossed the pass and began our descent to the trailhead.

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

Sea Stacks, Rocky Point

December 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Sea stacks dot the rugged Big Sur coastline at Rocky Point in evening light.

Continuing with the theme of evening light on the Big Sur coastline, I made this photograph along a favorite section of this portion of the California coast not long before sunset. (I left enough time after photographing this scene to drive back up the coast to more or less the small road-cut just visible in the upper right corner of the frame, from which I made another photograph shooting back into a large cove that is out of the range of this photograph to the right.) At this time, perhaps a half hour or so before sunset, the color of the light was warming and intensifying but had not yet reached that obviously red stage that comes right at and right after actual sunset.

The peninsula in the upper part of the photograph is known as Rocky Point and, among other things, is a spot many may know because of a restaurant perched there above these stunning views of the Pacific coast. (I hear it is pricey!) My camera position was at a pull-out along the Pacific Coast Highway at a spot where the road rises to pass around another bit of land that extends to the west, and this high camera position let me aim the camera down to minimize the sky and fill the frame with the ocean, the rocky sea stacks and cliffs, and the “point” itself. With the main variable being the unpredictable patterns in the surf, I made a series of exposures at what I thought might be likely moments and then selected from among them in post. I like the series of diagonal lines in the foreground surf and the way the low sun picks off the tops of the waves.

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

Rocky Creek Bridge, Sunset

December 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Sunset light illuminates the Rocky Creek Bridge, winter surf, a natural arch, and a rugged section of the Big Sur coastline.

This is, for me, essentially the prototypical Big Sur coastline photograph. The Rocky Creek bridge spans, not surprisingly, the canyon holding Rocky Creek, located in a bay not far from the well-known Rocky Point south of Carmel, California along the coast highway. This little scene holds most of the elements that we identify with this area: the old coast highway bridge with its curving support structures, turbulent surf, headlands and bluffs, a small beach, steep cliffs dropping into the ocean, and sea stacks, rocky islands, and natural arches.

I have photographed almost this exact same scene many times, but with the variables of season, weather, light, and surf I keep coming back. I have several black and white photographs of the scene that are among my favorites, but I have been trying to get a color photograph for some time. It turns out to be a bit trickier than it might seem. I wanted sun, but not too much sun. In the wrong light, the colors in the scene can be difficult with a lot of neutral gray, brown and dark greens. In the morning the light comes from behind the bridge, in the midday hours the light (when it isn’t foggy!) can be overly harsh, and in the evening fog and offshore clouds can interrupt the light.

On this visit to the Monterey Peninsula area I had several opportunities to photograph this spot in mostly clear weather and near sunset when the light comes from the right side and takes on the warmer, saturated “golden hour” quality. I shot it on two evenings. On one the light went flat too quickly when the sun dropped behind clouds parked well off shore. The same thing almost happened on this evening and, in fact, shortly after I made this exposure the light went flat. But before that happened I got a few moments of this beautiful, warm, low angle light coming from the sun as it dropped toward the horizon and lit up the bridge and portions of the rocky terrain.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: rocky

Sea Stacks, Rocky Point

Rocky Creek Bridge, Sunset

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