Tag Archives: saturated

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

Red Wall Sunrise

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Red Wall Sunrise
Saturated sunrise light on sandstone cliffs and ledges, Zion National Park.

Red Wall Sunrise. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Saturated sunrise light on sandstone cliffs and ledges, Zion National Park.

If you have been reading my posts about Utah recently, you may recall that I mentioned the striking contrast between my home range, the Sierra Nevada, and the far more colorful landscapes of Utah. Every time I return from red rock country the California landscape seems so… gray. (Don’t worry. I get over this quickly, and there’s plenty to photograph here, too!) But in many places in Utah the combination of blue sky, red rock, and green foliage — often with a few other colorations mixed in — produces a landscape of remarkably varied coloration.

But sometimes things go just a bit over the top. I have a few photographers here and there in my archives where the colors were so intense or so unusual that I hesitate the share them, as I know that someone will inevitably doubt that the photograph represents something close to what happened. (To be sure, photographs do not simply “capture” what the camera saw, and most good photography involves some level of post processing… just like good writing involves some degree of editing.) This sunrise light in Zion Canyon produced something that seems, at least in a photograph, to be unbelievable and even impossible. But red dawn light on red rock walls actually can look like this, at least for a brief interval. The truth of the matter here is that I had to reduce the color saturation!

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Mono Lake, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Ship Yard Buildings, Crane

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Ship Yard Buildings, Crane
Weathered ship yard buildings illuminated by saturated colors of artificial lighting

Ship Yard Buildings, Crane. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Weathered ship yard buildings illuminated by saturated colors of artificial lighting

I recently had a chance to return to this old ship yard facility near Vallejo, California to work on night photography. This is actually the place where I first tried out that genre approximately fifteen years ago. It was more or less on a whim — I read that someone was inviting photographers to come up to Mare Island, in conjunction with the annual Flyway Festival, and find out about night photography. I knew almost nothing about it, but decided to give it a try. Since that time I’ve been hooked. I’ve returned to photograph that locations often during the intervening decade and a half, and my night photography expanded from that beginning point to incorporate other subjects and places. (Most recently I have focused on night street photography done with small handheld cameras.)

This photograph is a prime example of several of the things that intrigue me about photographing at night. Scenes that might seem mundane in “normal” daylight are often transformed in the night. Not only do many distractions simply disappear, but the light itself, especially in areas with varied artificial illumination, transforms these subjects. In many places LED lights have replaced the wild mix of tungsten, fluorescent, sodium vapor, and other sources today — an unfortunate development in the visual sense, as LED light is more or less like daylight. But in places like this spot, the colors of the light become intense. Here it is the exceedingly green light of a large work light that predominates. Another appealing aspect of night photography is that it lets me make photographs of things that I really can’t see with my own eyes. In the ambient lighting I could only barely see the details of this scene. But with a long exposure there is enough light to reveal features that I could not see at all, a pure example of “seeing what the camera sees.”

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: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

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Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds
Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds. Yosemite National Park, California. September 20, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A tree and granite slab are lit by brilliant sunset light from a dissipating evening thunderstorm, Yosemite National Park.

This was another of those sometimes-surprising bursts of evening Sierra color that results in effects so gaudy that they almost seem unreal – but this is real. I was camped down in a valley among trees so I wasn’t initially expecting much in the way of spectacular sunset photography. Instead, I planned to take advantage of the early shadows in the valley and get some evening photographs under soft light without any direct sun at all. I first worked some moving water where the nearby river flowed across granite slabs, and then I contemplated photographing some small plants in deeply cracked and patterned granite. As a worked my way across this granite, I remembered a small tree on the other side of the bowl that had looked like an interested photo subject a few days ago, so I walked over to that area where the tree stands in a shallow granite bowl.

Earlier in the afternoon I could see huge thunderheads building up to my east, but they did not move far enough west to affect me with anything more than a bit of gray sky. However, as the clouds built up to higher elevations, their tops began to take on the familiar “anvil” shape and the upper portions of the “anvils” began to spread to the west and out over my position. This is a classic setup for potentially spectacular evening sky color. Near sunset the clouds can pick up intense red/orange coloration from the sun setting in the west. At the same time, the storms begin to dissipate, creating semi-transparent “curtains” of virga (falling rain that doesn’t reach the ground), unusual shapes along the bottoms of the clouds, clouds emerging out of the gray murk as the sunset light picks them up.

As I arrived at my little tree, I quickly lost interest in that subject as the cloud light show began. First the bottom of the thunderhead began to turn brilliantly orange and red. Then the lower reaches of the small storm began to produce very unusual cloud shapes including mammatus clouds. Virga produced a brightly colored by semi-transparent scrim. It quickly became so bright that the red/orange colors began to wash the granite bowl, and I turned my camera from the little tree to the uphill granite surfaces and the clouds above.

In this vertical format image the tip of a small tree extends above the top of a dome-like area above me, and the brilliant light from the clouds washes the dome with color. The colors here have not been “amped up” in post – in fact, I’ve actually toned some of them down a bit!

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Textures, Photographs: Urban/Street

Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light

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Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light
Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light

Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 26, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A brick wall with windows and a door is illuminated by garish yellow artificial lighting at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

During the final weekend of February I was able to join my friends from The Nocturnes for an “alumni” shoot at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at Vallejo, California. I photograph at this location a few times every year – most often with The Nocturnes – and each time I go I find something new or else find a new way to photograph something familiar.

This wall is in a little side alley off or one of the main roads through the facility. Although it certainly doesn’t look like it in this photograph, this is a fairly dark area of the island where rows of large factory buildings (mostly abandoned) are lit, for the most part, by a few security lights. Standing there next to me as I made the photograph, this is not what you would have seen. At best, I could make out the shapes and arrangement of the windows and door, recognize that the wall was constructed of bricks, and notice that the light from nearby yellowish artificial lights was diffused and broken up by shining through intervening fences and other stuff.

But, for me at least, one of the goals of night photography is to see what cannot be seen with our own eyes. The whole idea of a “realism” in night photography seems almost crazy to me, at least when shooting such dark subjects as this one. “Reality” is an incredibly dark and dim and barely visible wall. What is more interesting to me is what the camera can see in the near dark. Here it reveals the intense yellow/orange color of the artificial lighting and the uneven patterns of light and shadow.

(It also occurred to me as I worked on this photograph that while I generally am somewhat conservative with color and saturation and all the rest in my photography of natural landscapes… the wild, garish, and intense color and light of this night photography may represent an opposite pole for me.)

More Night Photography

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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.