Tag Archives: san luis

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Trees and Pond, Winter Morning

April 20, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A row of winter trees stands along a frost-rimmed San Joaquin Valley pond

To me, this photograph looks deceptively warm, perhaps due to the warm color of some of the light and the distant fields beyond the trees. The truth is that it was freezing cold! The temperature was in the upper 20’s (cold for Californians!) and the air was damp as it always is this time of year in these marshy valley lowlands and there was thick frost on the ground.

We were here to photograph migratory birds once again. At this location, an official wildlife refuge, a perimeter road circles the place, and it is pretty much our routine to circle it more than once on our visits. The first pass is typically right around dawn, as was the case this time, and often seems to be in thick or – if we are lucky – clearing fog. Later circuits often reveal changing light, thinning fog, different birds, and warmer temperatures – until a final trip around the loop usually concludes with us shooting into the dusk period until there is no longer enough light for photography. Near one corner of the loop there is a parking area, an observation deck, and nearby short trail. (Hiking is not permitted in most of the refuge, as people hidden in cars are apparently perceived to be less threatening by the birds.) When we stop here I almost always do at least a momentary transition from wildlife photographer to landscape photographer and make a few photographs that don’t include birds at all. This pond and the row of bare trees on a levee along one side have attracted my attention almost every time I visit here, and seem to suggest to me something about the vast flat agricultural terrain of this part of the valley.

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: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Diablo Range, Winter Sunset

April 15, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Colorful winter sunset over the Diablo Range, seen from California’s San Joaquin Valley

It is rare for me to shoot a scene quite like this one, with the setting sun included in the frame. It was a sort of spontaneous thing. I had a very long lens on the camera since I was photographing geese and cranes in the evening light, and when I looked up and saw that the sun was setting right in the low point on the ridge of the Diablo Range I quickly grabbed my tripod and made a few exposures of this scene.

This time right around and just after sunset is what I think of as the magic hour here in this Valley between the Sierra and the Diablo Range. Much of the pre-sunset coming and going of the geese pauses and things seem to slow down. The wild color was only there for a brief moment, and only in this specific part of the sky right above the setting sun, where the low light reflected off the bottom of a high, thin cloud layer. A single bird (perhaps a hawk? is in the upper branches of the tree at far left, and some light reflects off of the surface of the ponds at this wildlife refuge.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Four Ross’s Geese, Sunset Light

April 14, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Four Ross’s geese in flight against the sky in sunset light

I photographed this group of Ross’s geese late in the day, just as golden hour light was beginning to intensify. We had spent the day in the San Joaquin Valley, visiting a couple of wildlife refuges, and returned at the end of the day to the place where we had begun shooting before dawn. We hoped for some combination of evening geese and then a dusk fly-in of sandhill cranes.

The amount of control you have when photographing these birds is minimal. It is up to them to decide where they will settle in, when and in what direction they will fly, and much more. A lot of the process involves doing things that you hope will increase your odds – being in likely spots at likely times, and so forth – then being ready to take advantage of whatever comes your way. The latter requires some sensitivity to how things are developing, some experience with the camera so that you can make decisions quickly and track flying birds that may turn up unexpectedly, and more. The situation with the geese on this evening was a bit unusual, at least in my experience. At this place we have often been able to find very large flocks of the birds late in the day, at which point a reasonable strategy is to position yourself nearby, taking into consideration the direction of the light, possible backgrounds, and the paths they will likely fly. Then you wait, ready to photograph, until the birds decide to do what birds decide to do! With luck, they will lift off in interesting groups, against interesting backdrops, and in good light. On this evening, we were only able to find one relatively small group of Ross’s geese. (We saw other much larger groups in the area, but they were further off and in places inaccessible to us.) So we found out spot nearby and waited, photographing very small groups of them as they lifted off and flow to the north. However, a few groups did an extra loop or two around us, coming back over our position quite low. You never know how the birds will line up, and often they will ether be too separated from one another or else they are so tightly clustered that you get blocked heads or wings that cover other birds. However, this group was polite enough to line themselves up in such a way that as they flew past each of them was completely visible in the evening light.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

The Cranes Return, Evening

February 5, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The sandhill cranes return to the marshes of the San Joaquin Valley at dusk on a mid-winter evening.

For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, the evening return of the sandhill cranes is one of the magical things among a host of magical things about central California’s winter migratory bird population. I think I was primed to regard these birds this way by reading about them many years ago, though I never quite new what sandhill cranes actually were and I presumed that they were only found in far-off places. Then when I first began to photograph birds seriously – which was only a few years ago – one of my first encounters with the winter bird popular involved finding sandhill cranes in fields south of Sacramento. Then, perhaps last winter, there was an evening at a wildlife refuge in the Central Valley when I was photographing geese with a small group of friends. There had been many, many Ross’s geese around that evening and as dusk approached the goose photography gradually came to an end as the geese departed. After the intense focus of shooting those birds, once they were gone we sort of looked up and realized that the sun was gone and that the world was quieting down. It seemed like the show was over. And then I heard a sound from over the trees to the southeast, a sound I now immediately recognize as the distinctive call of the cranes, and within moments huge flocks of these birds began to coast overhead and look for landing spots.

That is now how I expect to see them – at some point during the dusk period when most everything else has started to quiet down, the cranes appear. Their sound is a distinct contrast with the wild and raucous cackling of the geese, an altogether calmer and quieter call. And their mode of flight is also different. While the geese often launch loudly into the sky in huge, flapping clouds, the cranes coast in slowly and rather quietly, often in long lines, and their motion is slower and smoother. On this evening, at a point when there was barely enough light left to make photographs, they appeared to my left and crossed in front of me with the western dusk sky as a backdrop.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: san luis

Trees and Pond, Winter Morning

Like this:

Diablo Range, Winter Sunset

Like this:

The Cranes Return, Evening

Like this:

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

Share this page:

Like this:

Share this page:

Like this:

Share this page:

Like this:

Share this page:

Like this:

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