Tag Archives: season

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

Floating Cottonwood Leaves, Autumn

December 31, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Floating cottonwood leaves nearly obscure the surface of a small pond along the Escalante River, Utah

On our first of two hikes into the Escalante Canyon we had to contend with very strong winds. Wind is usually not the landscape photographer’s friend. Not only does it create some issues for camera stability, but it also sets trees and other foliage in motion, and given the relatively long exposures we sometimes use – especially when shooting down in the bottom of a deep canyon – making motion blur a very serious issue. It is virtually impossible to stop the blurring motion of leaves and grasses and branches. To some extent you might be able to make use of this and “go with the blur,” but that isn’t likely to work with all shots.

However, there is often a silver lining behind such clouds, and one bright spot with wind is that in the fall it drops lots of colorful leaves on the ground and into any water than happens to be lying about. As we worked our way downstream we came to a spot where a small stream joined the main watercourse in a flat area. Because of the flat terrain the water had created some almost still pools in places where faster flows had previously carved out hollows in the sand, and the surface of these ponds was almost completely covered with freshly fallen cottonwood leaves.

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

Cottonwood Trees and Cloud-Filled Sky

December 27, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Massive old cottonwood trees silhouetted against the cloud-filled autumn sky, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

This photograph was a sort of passing whimsy, in a sense. In this particular canyon that we visited in late October, our attention as mostly focused on avoiding inclusion of the sky in the frame. For the most part, the tall cliff walls were almost the default background for many photographs, so I paid little attention to the sky, for the most part, except to contrive ways to keep its distracting solid blue out of the frame, where it would distract from the colors and shapes and textures of rock and trees and water.

But when I came straight up to this tree just before we entered a narrow section of the canyon, it is was impossible ignore. It is actually a single tree that splits into two twin trunks near its base, with each trunk then sprouting a group of curving, twisting and interlocking branches high above the ground. With this subject, out in the open as it was, photographing it against the background of rock would not have worked, and it was so tall that I was essentially forced to shoot it with the camera pointing up. Fortunately, there were interesting clouds in the sky, and even more fortuitously the lines in the clouds roughly lined up with the left half of the v-shape of the two converging ridges down that canyon. Even better, this shallow “v” of the canyon rims and low peaks beyond echoed and cradled the somewhat similar shape found in the upper branches of the tree.

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

Ross’s Geese, Tree and Marsh

December 20, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A thick flock of Ross’s geese flies above a marsh and a solitary tree in California’s Central Valley

After a full morning (and then some!) of photographing mostly Ross’s geese at a Central Valley wildlife refuge, we took a short break for a mid-afternoon lunch and then hurried back to the refuge by about 3:30 for evening photography. One of the last things we did before taking this break was to briefly assemble at the main overlook near the entrance to the refuge, where we were a bit surprised to see lots of geese settling in on one of the nearby ponds, and from which we could look back and see still more geese at the edges of the pasture where we had been photographing them.

As is often the case on a tule fog day like this one in the Central Valley, while the fog did “clear,” the general haziness never did completely go away. Instead the atmosphere remained mildly opaque, and it glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. Looking west, it was almost hard to see into this glow, but that is the direction we looked to see the pond and beyond it some isolated trees and the wetlands disappearing into the distance. Behind us, back on that pasture, the flock suddenly lifted off all at once and the birds made a large loop or two around us. I could see that they were likely to pass by the far edge of this pond and by the silhouetted tree, so I did a “landscape on the fly,” shooting handheld with a 100-400mm zoom as the birds came into the composition that I quickly found.

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

Winter Haze and Trees, Central Valley

December 14, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Hazy California Central Valley light on groves of trees as tule fog clears

In early December, 2012 I had my third opportunity of the season to photograph winter migratory birds. (The first time was last month when I made a quick foray to nearby Central Valley refuges, the second was shortly after that when I found myself with a free day in the Seattle area and drove up to Skagit Valley to photograph trumpeter swans and snow geese.) This was an especially great trip since not only were there birds about (Ross’s geese, a few odd snow geese, white-faced ibises, sandhill cranes, white pelicans, a few egrets and a single great blue heron) but the conditions turned out to be good almost all day and I was joined by a band of great folks: Michael Frye and Claudia Welsh, Dave and Charlotte Hoffman, and my wife Patty Mitchell. And what a day it turned out to be!

Things did not begin so promisingly. As Patty and I drove over from the south San Francisco Bay Area there was a lot of fog and continued to thicken until shortly after leaving Los Banos behind, where we encountered the classic pea soup Central Valley tule fog. Although it was so shallow that we could look up and see pre-dawn Venus and the new moon, ahead it was so thick that the road was barely visible in front of us. It was still thick when we reached the refuge and met the rest of the gang, and on the first part of our drive around the refuge the fog was so thick that we could barely seen any birds, although we could hear them. (One of the most mysterious experiences was hearing sandhill cranes nearby and being able to tell that they were airborne and moving but not see them at all until they would momentarily and briefly partially emerge from the murk and then just as quickly disappear.) Finally, as we came around the far side of the refuge we found a very large group of Ross’s geese close to the dirt road, and from here on things only got better. We had hours of shooting in the fog, which only slowly diminished and didn’t thin out enough to let sun through until probably noon or so. But this was actually a Good Thing, as on a perfectly clear morning the sense of mystery that fog imparts would have been missing… and the shooting probably would have been over in an hour or two. Instead, we continued until it was after 1:30, at which point we finally broke away long enough for lunch before returning for an evening shoot. Again, conditions that started out looking unpromising – the clouds of an incoming weather front were beginning to block the sky to the west – turned out to be perfect and even exceptional as the geese continued their show and the sky lit up brilliantly right at sunset.

I suppose that this photograph proves that I’m still a landscape photographer at heart. While looking around the refuge for birds, my eyes kept moving to the groves of large cottonwood trees and the smaller individual trees, many of which still held a bit of fall color. I’m also a really big fan of misty, hazy atmosphere, and we had that in spades. The fog did lift, but it left behind a beautiful luminous atmosphere and could glow in the right light.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: season

Floating Cottonwood Leaves, Autumn

Ross’s Geese, Tree and Marsh

Winter Haze and Trees, Central Valley

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