Tag Archives: shadow

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

Pacific Ocean, Clearing Storm

March 3, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Sun breaks through clouds as a storm clears above the Pacific Ocean along the California coast.

On this mid-February day, we did a long looping drive down from the San Francisco Bay Area to the lower end of Big Sur coast and back up along the Coast Highway. It seems that for a good part of the past month or two, my photographic trips have been excellent predictors of awful weather, usually of the gray, flat, and cloudy type. (Fortunately, I’ve seen enough great days that I feel like this is a matter of balance in the universe, and I know that I’ll get my good light days again soon enough.) Although I proclaimed that by going south we would escape the northern California fog that was around that day, by the time we got out to the coast near Piedras Blancas… it was raining! And rain wasn’t even in the weather forecast.

When I encounter such weather or other impediments to photography, I have a series of ways to cope with the situation. I tell myself that I’m “scouting” locations that I’ll come back to in better conditions – and, frankly, this often turns out to be true. Sometimes I might just decide not to focus on photography so much and perhaps try other things. But most often I keep looking, and sometimes I start seeing small things that sort of sneak up on me and are then gone. Looking at this photograph you might imagine a day of glorious light passing through broken clouds to light the ocean. In reality, it was moments of such light, with many moments of gray in between. But when this light does shine though a cloud deck that is thinning and produces reflecting patterns stretching to the horizon, such a moment may make a long day’s drive worth it.

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: Abstract, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Urban Wall, Tree Shadow in Winter Light

February 19, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The shadow of a tree casts its shadow in winter light across an urban wall.

I made this photograph in the very late afternoon near the end of December, 2012. For some reason, each year at about this time I get the idea of doing a personal “photo walk” that starts at my front door and then wanders around the “neighborhood” in a two-mile or so radius. Almost invariably, the walk takes place late in the day and lasts through the sunset hours. I frequently cover (or perhaps I should write “cover again”) familiar territory, and I even re-photograph some of the same subjects that I have photographed in the past. (This isn’t the first time that I have photographed this wall.) I usually walk slowly for the most part, focusing more on looking than on walking. By slowing down and especially by paying attention to things I might photograph, I invariably see things – within walking distance of my home – that I would otherwise not see at all.

This photograph probably looks like a very strange amorphous thing to some viewers, so let me at least explain what you see. This is a concrete wall, with low angle sun striking it almost directly from the left, producing stretched shadows from a nearby tree. The wall is painted green, but the very warm golden hour light moves the color toward yellow. The wall apparently is an attractive target for vandals/graffiti artists, since it is apparent that something was previously painted out using a slightly different color paint. Although it is hard to see in this small web jpg, I like this odd mix of colors and the interesting details of the wall’s texture as they are revealing by the side-light.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

China Camp Pier

January 13, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A decrepit pier extends into San Francisco Bay at China Camp, California

This was my first visit to China Camp, on the shores of the north San Francisco Bay, after several years of thinking about it. I had seen some other photographs from the place and I knew a bit of the history of the old Chinese Camp fishing village and that it had been protected by state park status, but I couldn’t actually point to it on a map. It turned out that a group of photographers was going to visit China Camp during a weekend of shooting around the Bay Area, and I ended up more or less linking up with them.

I arrived before the rest of the group and I began by scoping out a few things for later shots and then photographing a small island that is very close to this old village. Finishing with that subject, I headed down the hill to the cover when the old village buildings are located. This pier is one of the more striking sights in the area, being in a sort of picturesque state of disrepair that has left parts of it leaning at odd angles, further accented by the odd little utility line leading out toward the water. As soon as I arrived at the small beach by the building from which the pier extends, I knew that I wanted to photograph it in a way that included the little building and the pier stretching across the frame toward the horizon, and I was pretty certain that I wanted to render it in black and white. At almost this precise moment the clouds thinned a bit and a bit of soft sunlight shone on the scene, accentuating the shadows on the water – so I quickly went to work and made three exposures of the scene before the light went dull again.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Evening Light on Shoreline Trees, Steelhead Lake

October 14, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early evening light coming across the Sierra crest illuminates shoreline trees at Steelhead Lake, eastern Sierra Nevada.

This photograph was made during that quiet evening hour, about the time when dinner has been finished and food stowed for the night, sleeping bag set up in tent, and things slow down (from their already-slow pace!) as the golden hour light comes on. Typically, the afternoon wind decreases and the lake surface becomes smooth, more clearly revealing the fish rising for an evening meal.

This is another photograph made within a few feet of my bivy sack campsite on a peninsula rising above this lake in the McGee Creek drainage. As I had eaten dinner with my two backpacking partners, I had been keeping an eye on this little scene that I had checked out earlier in the afternoon, watching to see if the four small trees down near the water might catch the last light from the setting sun before the evening shadow came across the lake.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: shadow

Pacific Ocean, Clearing Storm

Urban Wall, Tree Shadow in Winter Light

China Camp Pier

Evening Light on Shoreline Trees, Steelhead Lake

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