Tag Archives: rocky

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan

December 10, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Snow crested Mount Morgan rises above McGee Canyon and the sagebrush-covered hills of Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

I’ve been traveling to the Sierra for many years. My first recollection of the range is a faint mental image of a shoreline park at Lake Tahoe when my family moved to California – I was four years old. My next memory is of staying at a small motel in El Portal next to the high water of the Merced River back in the days before the current mega-hotels were erected. One thing that all of my early Sierra experiences had in common is that I always approached the range from the west since I lived (and still live) in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the person whose orientation to the range is from the west, the Sierras are a range that begins almost imperceptibly in the Central Valley. Although you can see distant peaks from the Valley on clear days, it is hard to say where the range begins. As you head east you encounter some very small and rounded hills which gradually get larger. Eventually you are going up more than up and down as you travel through oak and grass lands. At some point the road rises into forest, but the mountain tops are mostly rounded and forest covered. Keep going and a few rocky prominences begin to appear along the ridges and some distant granite peaks become visible. Only after a lot of driving do you find yourself in the higher reaches of the range, and this only in the few areas where roads cross from west to east. In most places you cannot even see the summit of the range close up from the west without walking a long ways.

It was only many years later that I first went over the summit of the range and saw it from the east side. The Sierra is (are?) completely different when approached this way. Instead of a long, gradual, and relatively gentle rise to high valleys and forests and meadows, the eastern escarpment of the Sierra rises abruptly – one might say violently – and directly, in most places, from the high desert sagebrush country of Owens Valley and similar places. This wall of peaks seems almost inaccessible, and I imagine that many people who only drive past on highway 395 must regard it that way.

This photograph was made from a spot just a mile or two east of highway 395, out an a gravel road that I know. I have photographed this shadowed foreground ridge and the peaks beyond in the past, so I had a fairly good idea of what I would find at this location before I made the photograph on an early October morning when fall storms had dusted the highest peaks with snow. I used a somewhat long lens and tight framing to emphasize the rise from the foreground desert to the very high peaks beyond.

This photograph is 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: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Mist and Curving Ridge, Yosemite Valley

November 27, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Mist from an autumn storm flows across the crest of a curving ridge high on the walls of Yosemite Valley.

The mist from this late-October storm is flowing over the edge of a curving ridge high above the floor of Yosemite Valley, leaving just a hint of the higher, curving ridge above this pinnacle through the clouds at upper left. This photograph, like one I posted very recently, was made as I alternated my attention between the image of Upper Yosemite Fall alternately transitioning between filtered sun and obscuring clouds and small details of the closer Valley walls as seen in this image. From moment to moment there were many interesting combinations of light, cloud, trees, and rock… but they came and went quickly and almost without warning.

I usually post photographs here before printing them, and not all of the posted photographs necessarily get printed. This one is an exception in that I made the first print of it yesterday. I’m also happy to say that some very subtle details that are barely or not visible in this web jpg reproduction are there in the print, including some faint outlines of trees in the upper left portion of the frame and some details of the rocky face at lower right.

This photograph is 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: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Mist Shrouded Spire, Yosemite Valley

November 26, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A rocky spire emerges from the mist of an autumn storm along the rim of Yosemite Valley.

Still mining the backlog of photographs from my late-October visit to Yosemite Valley, here is another photograph made in the beautiful rainy and misty conditions of an autumn storm that came across the Sierra during the last weekend of the month. Since I’m crazy about photographing mist and fog, there was almost too much to shoot at times! When I made this photograph I was moving back and forth between isolated shots of small sections of the upper Valley rim blanketed by fog and light rain, and the scene of Yosemite Falls which was alternately socked in and almost clear. I kept my eyes on the cloud conditions just upwind of the falls, and when it looked like a clearing was approaching I would swing my camera that direction. Then, as thicker clouds moved across the falls and obliterated that view I redirected the camera towards small and quickly changing bits of cloud-covered landscape elsewhere along the cliffs nearby.

This is the sort of scene that makes me think more about how tremendously difficult it was/is to photograph such things with film! A subject like this is anything but static – the clouds move across and through the trees and rocks and change continuously, often so quickly that you only realize what has happened when the opportunity has passed. Accomplishing this with a few sheets of film must require not only tremendously good luck but also an excellent understanding of how these conditions evolve. I try to apply the same awareness of the conditions when I shoot such scenes… but I’m quite happy to be able to make multiple exposures quickly and without a lot of fuss!

This photograph is 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: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

First Light Above the Buttermilks, Autumn Storm

November 8, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

A faint rainbow briefly glows in dawn light on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada above the Buttermilks as an autumn storm builds.

Since I wrote previously about acting on a hunch to be in this spot in time to catch a few minutes of dawn light, I won’t recount the whole thing here – though I would like to describe the phenomenon a bit more and perhaps make a point or two about light and opportunities.

The photograph is of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada above Bishop, California and was made on an early autumn morning of a day that brought one of the first winter-like storms of the season. I found myself in this spot (as described at the link) for the very few minutes during which this light was present – and afterwards the light was simply gone and the rest of the day was overcast and rainy. The circumstances have me thinking about a few things about light and “being there” at the right moment.

Sometimes, even on a “poor light day” – though I like overcast conditions! – there can be a few brief moments of exceptional light. Catching them involves some combination of anticipating that these moments might occur, being there, and – let’s admit it! – dumb luck. In this case, all three were at work. I did not know that this light would occur, but I knew that the conditions offered a possibility. A clearing in the clouds along the eastern horizon allowed a horizontal beam of light to briefly hit the mountains right at dawn. It began by striking the clouds above the Sierra crest, soon hit the highest peaks, moved across the face of the range, and within minutes the show ended with light on the high desert. The band was so narrow that only one of these subjects was generally illuminated at a time – and the whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than five or ten minutes.

That description might make it sound like I’m saying that I’m just plain great at predicting such things and planning to be there. Not quite! If you had asked me a few minutes earlier, when I made the spontaneous decision to abandon my previous plans and high-tail it out to this spot, what the odds were that I’d see light like this I might have estimated them at perhaps 10% or less. In other words, if I repeated this little adventure 10 times, I’d guess that I’d fail to see light like this nine out of ten times. However, if I only go for “sure bets” (which I’ll take when I can get them!) I know that I’ll miss lots of special conditions that are not subject to prediction.

Which brings up the subject of luck. I often read that one should be able to know in advance what the photograph will look like, and that careful and full preparation will lead to good photographs. Well, sort of, but maybe not quite in the way that some imply. (There is an element of “preparation” in all of this that I’ll write about eventually, but that is a different thing.) Frankly, these subjects are too complex and too fleeting and too unpredictable to be subject to that sort of careful and precise planning in any sort of consistently useful way. The photographer cannot make that small band of open sky appear along the horizon on an autumn morning when a storm is building along the crest – but if everything goes right a photographer might be there at the right moment, prepared to make a photograph of it.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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