Tag Archives: shadows

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

Ocean, Winter Light

March 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Intense winter sunlight reflects on the cloud-shadowed surface of the Pacific Ocean along the Big Sur coast, California

From my perspective, winter is by far the most interesting time to visit and, especially, to photograph along California’s Pacific Ocean coastline. While summer is the popular season for travel, during that time of year the ocean tends to be tranquil and the weather is often foggy. While it is likely to be warm and sunny elsewhere in California in the summer, along the coast it can feel more like winter! But winter along the coast brings much more diverse conditions and even some surprising warmth when conditions are just right. When large Pacific storms churn away far north in the Gulf of Alaska, lines of huge waves may crash on the shoreline. When the storms arrive, the coastal areas can be whipped by wind-driven rain. But between the storms there can be days of crystal clear weather.

That was the weather on the last day of January when we took a long round trip down the Big Sur coast and back. Aside from some (beautiful!) coastal haze that glowed in the midday light, it was a clear day and surprisingly warm for the most part. Along the Big Sur coastline the Pacific Coast Highway alternates between the coastal lowlands and a track that takes it high into the rugged mountains along the shoreline. Vast expanses of the surface of the Pacific are visible from the highest spots, and as we started down from one of these high points we saw the water, with the color and texture of molten metal, stretching away into the sun and towards the horizon, with a few shadows from thin clouds darkening the water near the shore.

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

Dune Forms, Evening

January 20, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Shadows from evening light slanting across curved dune forms, Death Valley National Park

Having photographed here many times, I know these and other dunes of Death Valley fairly well – well enough at this point to have some ideas about where and when to photograph them and to be less interested in the more familiar views. I had spent the majority of the day, starting well before sunrise, exploring and photographing an entirely different area of the park, but as I did so I had formed a general plan to head to the dunes at the end of the day and photograph them in evening light. I had a bit of time after finishing with the first subject, so I headed back to camp to hang out a bit.

I may have hung out just a bit too long! My plans for the dunes were not exactly fixed, though I knew that I wanted to investigate a less visited area of lower dunes away from the main area and that I wanted to be out there shortly before sunset – to shoot the sunset light and then to continue shooting right on past sunset and into the beautiful and subtle dusk light. By the time I got to the dunes, I figured out that the winter sun sets a bit earlier than I had realized, and I had to hurry out to my shooting area. Although I did not have a specific idea of what I would shoot, I had some general ideas involving slanting light, shadows, curving shapes, texture of sand, and possibly some vegetation. But once on the scene I had to work extremely quickly, as the long shadows of the low angle sun moved quickly across the sand, and a new composite of light and shadow would appear only to move and then disappear in a matter of seconds or perhaps a minute or two. Within moments of making this photograph, the last warm sun on the dunes was gone, and I was left with the cold post-sunset light.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Sagebrush and Aspens

November 6, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Sparse, colorful aspen trees in the high sagebrush country east of the Sierra Nevada.

Back in October I made my annual trek to the east side of the Sierra Nevada to photograph autumn subjects, including but not limited to aspen trees in their fall colors. As often happens at this time of the year, we encountered a wide range of conditions ranging from beautiful sunny days to one day on which it snowed the entire time as we drove over the crest and down highway 395. Overall, this turned out to be a fine year for aspen color, though it was not exactly a typical year. The color came a bit early and seemed to change quickly in a number of areas. Even though many of us were concerned that the past two years of California drought – perhaps combined with the effects of global climate changes – might have reduced the colors, in the end the effect was simply to change the timing a bit. (And long time aspen photographers know that, in a sense, there really is no such thing as a “typical season” for aspen color.)

The final day of our five-day visit was a diverse one, and it took us to a range of quite different locations. It started in Mammoth Lakes, where we were surprised to find that it was snowing lightly when we left our motel in the pre-dawn darkness and headed out into Long Valley. After stopping there to photograph the morning snow flurries along the eastern Sierra, we continued to the east and drove all the way to Benton before turning around and heading back toward Mono Lake, investigating the interesting fall color in this less-visited area. As we reached highway 395 again we found that the snow was continuing to fall along the eastern escarpment here, too. We stopped in Lee Vining for a (very) late breakfast and decided to continue on to the north. After a stop to photograph the vast stands of aspens on the summit north of Lee Vining, it looked like the weather might be photographically interesting out toward Bodie, so we headed that direction. I photographed this little high desert valley with its small stands of autumn aspens momentarily illuminated as cloud shadows raced across the landscape. Mono Lake and the surrounding mountains are visible in the distance.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

August 26, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Late winter shadows fall across a suburban scene composed of a stucco wall, pipes, and a window

This is the second of two “walking around” photographs made in my neighborhood while wandering around with a camera and a couple of lenses. These walks are exercises in seeing, in several ways: When I carry the camera I pay a lot more attention to things around me that I would otherwise simply not see at all, and the process of looking and seeing photographs in places that are so mundane that I might regularly walk past them helps “tune up” my seeing skills.

As I often do, on this walk I was paying a lot of attention to shadows falling across the walls of buildings. As I write in my last photo post, once I started noticing the shadows, which are everywhere in this area, I began to see the buildings differently. For example, here is a building that I might otherwise have simply thought of as a tan building. But now it is a building with branches “painted” over almost its entire surface. And in this one, the branch shadows converge on the mundane little collection of faucets and wires and what-not at the lower left, then spread and open up to surround the white window frame above and to the right.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: shadows

Ocean, Winter Light

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Dune Forms, Evening

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Sagebrush and Aspens

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Pipes, Window, Stucco Wall, and Shadows

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

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