Tag Archives: shore

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake

December 6, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Morning light on the trees, boulders, and grasses of a sub-alpine Sierra Nevada lake, Yosemite National Park.

On the morning after my hike up to this lake we were all up early and eager to explore the surrounding area. Everyone rose well before sunrise, and we headed off in various directions for our first morning of exploration and to start shooting. I began in the forest, looking for some corn lily plants and then various snags and fallen trees, but I eventually ended up along the shoreline of the lake. A lake like this one has almost limitless subjects to photograph. I began working the edge of the lake by photographing a few shoreline trees, then moved on to photograph some large boulders in the lake not far from the shore. As I moved clockwise along the edge of the water I began to pick up one of my favorite subjects – trees back-lit by morning light – and I worked to find a few compositions that spanned the bright foreground rocks and grasses, the middle distance shoreline trees, and then the more distant and shaded talus slopes leading to overhead ridges.

There were six of us in the group, and it was interesting to observe the different ways we each worked. Everyone was up pretty early, but for the most part each photographer headed off to look for his own special subjects. Occasionally we would run into one another, but we most often took pains to not try to re-do one another’s shots. Some among us immediately began to explore a bit more widely, heading around the lake and into the forest along the far shore, while others started very close to our campsite and slowly began to expand their circle of subjects. Over the course of a number of days we all got to know the lake and its surroundings much better – there is nothing like staying in one place for three or four days to reveal it in more depth than might be apparent on a short overnight visit.

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: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Shoreline Rocks, Sierra Nevada

December 5, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Small plants grow on rocks near the shoreline of a sub-alpine Sierra Nevada Lake, Yosemite National Park.

Little gardens grow in these jumbles of rocks and boulders near the outlet stream of this sub-alpine lake where I spent nearly four days this past September. During this mid-September time frame the colors of the high country autumn are beginning to appear, as seen in the orange and brown colors of some of the leaves on the plants among the rocks.

I arrived at this lake late in the day, the rest of my party having arrived there earlier. They had the advantage of a pack train to carry most of their gear up here, but I was self-contained and schlepping the whole mess of backpacking and photography gear myself. I was beat when I arrived, and I first thought that I might just write off doing any photography that evening and just rest up and recuperate. But I started to feel a bit guilty about my laziness in the evening, and I went for a walk around the outlet stream of the nearby creek and made a few photographs in the soft evening light.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Tuolumne River Canyon Below Glen Aulin

November 22, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

The Tuolumne River enters Tuolumne River Canyon below the Glen Aulin High Sierra Camp.

This photograph looks west from a rocky point along the Tuolumne River just below Glen Aulin in the Yosemite National Park back-country. In September I spent a total of four nights in this specific area and photographed in and around the granite bowl that rises from the river near the foreground rocks and spreads to the right of the area shown here. The photograph was made very late in the afternoon – it had been raining when I arrived at Glen Aulin but, as often happens in the Sierra, the clouds dissipated later in the day and the skies were starting to clear before sunset.

While my favorite Sierra landscape is at the elevations where the last small trees give way to alpine tundra meadows and the rocky slopes of the highest peaks, there is also something very compelling about these lower (from my point of view) elevation areas, and especially about this particular spot along the Tuolumne. Looking west from this point along the river I had the distinct feeling that I was standing more or less on a boundary between the higher and more alpine zones (exemplified by the Tuolumne Meadows area) and the beginnings of the lower areas in which I feel like I’m heading towards the Central Valley. Here, all of the really tall peaks are behind me (OK, some are to my right…) and before me the land overall drops towards the Valley, the slightly hazy light and air of which is in the far distance in this photograph.

Making this feeling even stronger for me is the fact that very close to Glen Aulin, the Tuolumne abruptly changes from a generally meandering river that descends very gradually for the most part past large meadows and forests to one that drops precipitously into an increasingly narrow and steep canyon surrounded by granite slabs and domes and peaks that begin to take on an appearance that reminds me of Yosemite Valley.

Photographs: Imaginary Landscapes, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Surf, Rocks, and Horizon

November 14, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An imaginary landscape from surf, rocks and horizon at Point Lobos State Reserve, California.

I refer to photographs like this one as “imaginary landscapes” – though I suppose that this one is actually an imaginary seascape. The boundary between these photographs and my Regular Old Garden Variety Landscapes is a bit nebulous, but it relates to how far and how intentionally the interpretation of the scene departs from what might be regarded as its objective reality. In this case, some things were done at the time of exposure and some other things were done in post that make this image more obviously a subjective interpretation of the scene than might be the case with many of my other photographs. But you could see that by looking at it, right?

In any case, this is a single photographic “capture” made with a long exposure time that was extended by the use of a nine-stop neutral density filter – and this is what creates the majority of the soft quality of the image. Some additional work was done in post to further manipulate the original image – work with saturation and certain ways of diffusing portions of the image and so forth. In the end, little of that matters beyond the fact that these techniques were ways of producing the image that I had in mind, and which I intend to evoke something about the nature of the real scene upon which it is based.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: shore

Rocky Shoreline, Sub-Alpine Lake

Shoreline Rocks, Sierra Nevada

Tuolumne River Canyon Below Glen Aulin

Surf, Rocks, and Horizon

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