Tag Archives: season

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Nature

Wetlands Tree, Tule Fog

Image December 11, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A wetlands tree in thick autumn tule fog.

Believe it or not, this is a color photograph, made on a late-autumn morning in California’s Great Central Valley. The dense tule fog did not simply reduce visibility — it also drained the color right out of the landscape. Foggy landscapes can have color — the blue tones of thick fog in the very early hours, and the warmer tones of shallow fog glowing in sunrise light. But in this case it was a bit later, and the colors of the earliest light had faded and backlit fog glowed and muted the color.

When photographing a subject like this I find myself on a fine line between not enough fog and not enough detail. Sometimes the fog is so thick that a subject that seems visible in person has so little contrast that it almost is invisible in a photograph. But too much definition and the mystery of the fog diminishes. Here I think I have hit the middle ground — there’s perhaps just enough detail to delineate the broad features, but many fine details are missing or softened.

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: Central California, Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature

Autumn Fog

Image December 10, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning tule fog and autumn color in Central Valley wetlands

Last week I visited a place where I have photographed for years. At one point I passed an obscure corner there that I have probably seen at last a hundred times, usually without giving it more than a brief glance. But this time a fortuitous conjunction of autumn color, drifting fog, and soft morning light caught my attention, and I paused to make a photograph.

While there is certainly an element of careful preparation and planning that goes into landscape photography, ultimately we are at the mercy of forces over which we exercise little or no control. There is no way that I could “plan” to be at a relatively nondescript corner of a particular place at just the moment that the fog drifts a bit one way or another to gently reveal a bit of soft, directional light on a bush. And that’s a big part of why I keep going back to places like this.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

New Hampshire Leaves

Image December 6, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A patch of autumn leaves along the Kancamagus Highway, New Hampshire

While it may seem that autumn is almost over, the autumn photography season isn’t bound by the calendar. I can find subjects in the Sierra that suggest autumn to me as early as the end of August, and it isn’t unusual to find some autumn red, gold, brown, and orange colors in parts of California all the way into January. All of this is by way of explaining that I’m not done with the autumn photographs yet!

This photograph comes from our October visit to New Hampshire, where we photographed New England fall color for the first time. After years of listening to fellow photographers rhapsodize about autumn in his region, we were overdue for a visit. I made this photograph… next to a parking lot! We had stopped to make some photographs of the larger landscape, but the soft light on the leaves caught my attention. This small vignette suggests the wildly diverse colors of the autumn leaves in this region.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Autumn Morning, Big Sur Coast

Image December 3, 2022 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Spray and mist glow in autumn morning light along the Big Sur Coast.

Every time I visit the Big Sur coast — which I’ve been doing for decades — I manage to find something new. Sometimes it is just a different view on something that I’ve seen before — perhaps a different sort of light, unusual conditions of surf or weather, or a slightly different vantage point. Occasionally it is something that I did not know about — an obscure overlook, a juxtaposition of landscape elements, and so forth.

This location falls between those extremes. I have stopped to photograph this general area quite a few times. But there are innumerable little access points and foot paths that head out along the edge of the coastal bluffs, and this time I took one that I’ve seen many times but never followed. It took me to this overlook above a small cove backed by a series of small ridges running down to the waterline, with a taller hill in the distance.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: season

Wetlands Tree, Tule Fog

Autumn Fog

New Hampshire Leaves

Autumn Morning, Big Sur Coast

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