Tag Archives: shadow

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Titus Canyon Road

December 31, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

I made this photograph during midday hours after walking a ways up into the canyon from its mouth – the alternative to making the very long drive over the Grapevine Mountains from Amargosa Valley. (I have done the latter a few times, too.) While most Death Valley subjects tend to be appealing in the early morning or in the evening, many of the canyons can be at their best during the middle of the day, especially the very deep and narrow canyons like lower Titus Canyon. Here the canyon narrows down to the point that there is only room of a single gravel track, and twists and turns around rocky outcroppings. The light striking the upper canyon walls – out of the range of this photograph – reflects down into the canyon and produces soft, diffused illumination.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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.

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

Oaks and Hills, Winter Fog

December 24, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Morning winter fog clears from the oak forest and grassland of the Calero Hills, California.

This is a sort of scene that seems to me to be a prototypical California view. Almost anywhere you go west of the Sierra and away from either the redwoods or deserts, you won’t be too far from places like this that feature grassland, oak trees, and some sort of vertical relief in the landscape. This area happens to be a short drive from where I live. It is merely a local county park and not a place that most would regard as special. However, because it is so close, I have been able to spend a great deal of time here in all seasons, at all times of the day, and in all sorts of weather conditions. Eventually I found that there is an almost unending supply of potential photographic subjects even in this spot that would certainly not impress most people as being exceptional.

I made this photograph back near the beginning of 2010, and shortly after that a posted an early version here. That version was in a slightly wider format and it was in color. As part of my year-end review of all of my raw files from 2010, I saw this image again in its original form… and this time I saw it a bit differently, in black and white and with a more “traditional” 4:5 ratio format. Contrary to what I though originally, I now think that the narrower format does a more effective job of juxtaposing the stacked angles of close, middle and far ridges, and it also let me eliminate some stuff along the margins that now seems distracting to me.

To the extent that this version of the image works, I think it illustrates something that I’ve heard others say and which resonates with my own experience, namely that it is sometimes easier to “see” what is in a photograph when you get a bit more distance from the act of “capturing” it.

This photograph is 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: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan

December 10, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Snow crested Mount Morgan rises above McGee Canyon and the sagebrush-covered hills of Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

I’ve been traveling to the Sierra for many years. My first recollection of the range is a faint mental image of a shoreline park at Lake Tahoe when my family moved to California – I was four years old. My next memory is of staying at a small motel in El Portal next to the high water of the Merced River back in the days before the current mega-hotels were erected. One thing that all of my early Sierra experiences had in common is that I always approached the range from the west since I lived (and still live) in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the person whose orientation to the range is from the west, the Sierras are a range that begins almost imperceptibly in the Central Valley. Although you can see distant peaks from the Valley on clear days, it is hard to say where the range begins. As you head east you encounter some very small and rounded hills which gradually get larger. Eventually you are going up more than up and down as you travel through oak and grass lands. At some point the road rises into forest, but the mountain tops are mostly rounded and forest covered. Keep going and a few rocky prominences begin to appear along the ridges and some distant granite peaks become visible. Only after a lot of driving do you find yourself in the higher reaches of the range, and this only in the few areas where roads cross from west to east. In most places you cannot even see the summit of the range close up from the west without walking a long ways.

It was only many years later that I first went over the summit of the range and saw it from the east side. The Sierra is (are?) completely different when approached this way. Instead of a long, gradual, and relatively gentle rise to high valleys and forests and meadows, the eastern escarpment of the Sierra rises abruptly – one might say violently – and directly, in most places, from the high desert sagebrush country of Owens Valley and similar places. This wall of peaks seems almost inaccessible, and I imagine that many people who only drive past on highway 395 must regard it that way.

This photograph was made from a spot just a mile or two east of highway 395, out an a gravel road that I know. I have photographed this shadowed foreground ridge and the peaks beyond in the past, so I had a fairly good idea of what I would find at this location before I made the photograph on an early October morning when fall storms had dusted the highest peaks with snow. I used a somewhat long lens and tight framing to emphasize the rise from the foreground desert to the very high peaks beyond.

This photograph is 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: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Mount Morrison and Desert Hills, Morning

December 9, 2010 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early morning light on sagebrush covered Owens Valley hills and the Sierra crest near Mount Morrison.

I was out in this section of Owens Valley early on this October morning, initially to photograph at a small lake further out in the valley. However, knowing parts of this area pretty well from past visits, I wanted to try a photograph that included the foreground tree-covered ridge in morning light with the Sierra peaks in the background – so I headed back on a gravel road that travels a bit north of the paved road I had taken earlier in the morning. I found this scene with the early light illuminating the crest of the Sierra and the sagebrush-covered foreground hills, but with morning shadows still lying across the lower eastern face of the Sierra just south of Convict Lake.

The dusting of early season snow was left over from a week of early autumn storms. Mt. Morrison is the huge and impressive summit at the right end of the ridge. Mt. Baldwin is the small but very high summit near the left end. In between is a vertical rock face that appears to be split by a crack – I think it is called “the Great White Fang.”

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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