Tag Archives: scenic

Photographs: Austria, Photographs: Nature

Cliff-Edge Forest Above Werfen

September 4, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Forest trees and grassy meadow at the edge of a cliff above the town of Werfen, Austria

For looking to be such an astonishingly exposed location, this spot was actually quite easy to get to. Sorry if I disappoint anyone! ;-) Above the town of Werfen, Austria, not far from Salzburg, is a feature known as the Eisriesenwelt Ice Cave. It is a well-known and popular tourist destination, and since our “guides” (family members who live in Germany) suggested it, we went and joined the other tourists. Although this post isn’t really about the ice cave, I’ll at least mention that it is quite a spectacular thing to visit. The cave itself is quite something, but so is the process of getting to it. The cave is located very high up the face of a cliff above the Salzach River valley, in a place that you would hardly imagine would be accessible by normal folks. However, a combination of hiking, taking a ski-lift style tram, and then hiking some more, this time on a well-constructed trail across the face of the cliff, brings you to the entrance to the cave.

After we finished our tour of the cave we emerged into the sunlight to see that it was clouding up. As we hiked down to the upper tram station we began to hear some distant thunder. The moist atmosphere became thick, and although it was still mostly sunny in the valley below, many of the distant valleys and ridges were becoming partially obscured. At one point the trail followed the contour of a small gully and looped back away from the cliff edge, affording a view back across this bit of meadow and forest that ended abruptly at the edge of the void where the cliff dropped to the Salzach Valley below.

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Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Redwood Forest, Morning

September 3, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light in the redwood forest at Muir Woods National Monument

Walking along one of the main trails at Muir Woods, most of the forest was in deep shade. However, up the hillside to my right the morning sun had cleared a nearby ridge and was beginning to cast rays of light into the forest and, especially, to illuminate some of the deciduous trees a bit further up the hill. I had been looking closely at the trunks of big trees along the trail, trying to find compositions in this low light, but the bright light beyond distracted me.

Looking through this group of large, bulky, and mostly straight redwood trunks, I was struck by the difference between their appearance the slender and curving shapes of these further trees – which I think were probably laurels. I also like the slightly disjunct appearance of some of the closer trees, including the one curving from center to the left and the thin tree near the left that is more brightly lit by sun. For the photographers out there, this photograph presented a major exposure problem. As you can imagine, the range between the foreground shadows of the redwood trees and the sunlit trees in the distance was huge. Believe it or not, this photograph was made from a single exposure of the scene.

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

Boulders, Tree, and Dark Granite

September 2, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

A solitary tree stands on granite slabs among glacial erratic boulders against the dark background of a granite face in shadow

I have previously posted a few photographs from this early August four-day shoot in Yosemite, when I ranged between about Olmsted Point and Mono Lake for about four days. The photography was a bit strange compared to more normal years – there was smoke in the air from a fire near Mammoth Lakes and there was not much water due to the drought afflicting the mountains after a second very dry winter. So some of my photography instincts may have been challenged a bit, and I had to adapt to conditions – sometimes ending up shooting in a different place than planned when the haze was too thick, sometimes using the haze as part of the photograph, and also ranging a bit more widely than I might usually do.

On this morning I had decided to “work” that area between roughly Tenaya Lake and some rocky slabs a bit past Olmsted Point. I began at Tenaya just before sunrise, but the smoke haze was making things difficult. I made a few photographs along the curving shore as the first sun hit nearby ridges, but I wasn’t especially happy with the atmosphere or the color and quality of the light so I moved on. The slabs and domes along the road to the west of Tenaya Lake, which track the road for some distance and spread well beyond the road itself, have been an ongoing subject of interest to me. While the sun had hit the highest peaks by the time I got there, it had not quite worked its way down to these slabs, so I found some likely groups of glacial erratic boulders and various small trees and made some photographs. In this one, a single tree stands beyond a group of large boulders that had just been hit by the first light, and across a nearby canyon large granite walls are still in shadow.

Photographs: England

London Sunset

August 30, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Sunset over London, England

We had walked across to the south side of the Thames River earlier on this afternoon – I think it was the day that we visited the Tate Museum, which is located near the south end of the Millennium Bridge. We had been in this area earlier on the trip when we saw “A Midsummer Nights Dream” at the Old Globe Theater, and I had wanted to come back in the evening and try to time it so that I could be along the river during the golden hour and perhaps into the early evening. Sure enough, when we were ready to start out walk back across the bridge to where we would catch the Underground back to our hotel the light was just starting to get interesting. In this case, “interesting” included not only the normal golden hour light show but also the somewhat thick and humid atmosphere found here.

My main thoughts were to photograph the skyline to the north and south of the bridge, and to continue shooting as the evening lights began to come on. But when I saw this sun in the hazy sky I put on a long lens that did what I would do in the Sierra Nevada back home – I made a sunset photograph! However, the landscape in this image is distinctly British and distinctly London, with the most obvious feature being the BT Tower at the left.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: scenic

Cliff-Edge Forest Above Werfen

Redwood Forest, Morning

Boulders, Tree, and Dark Granite

London Sunset

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