Tag Archives: sierra

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Cliff Face, Detail

Image September 24, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Abstract forms and colors of a weathered and stained Sierra Nevada cliff

As I do almost every summer, I headed into the Sierra Nevada backcountry with a group of friends and photographers over the past week and a half of so. The group has been doing this since about 2001, and I began to work with them nearly a decade ago, eventually moving from showing up as a solo backpacker for a few days to participating fully in the visits. Typically we get packed in to a location with lots of photographic possibilities — a pack string brings in a lot of the gear, while we typically carry in our camera equipment. Once set up we can “work” the surroundings intensively, looking more deeply into the landscape and viewing it in various conditions and light. This provides us with special opportunities to learn the nearby landscape more intimately than if we were just passing through or hiking in and out each day. Equally important, as we live and work together for a week we form a very special little photographic community.

This year we were (again) in the John Muir Wilderness of the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Every place has its own visual personality. In this location high mountains surrounded us and produced several hours of soft, shaded light in the morning and evening, with fill light reflected from surrounding peaks rising into the sunlight…

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Alpine Meadow and Lake, Sierra Crest

Image September 2, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Sierra Nevada crest beyond an alpine meadow and lake

A short walk from our backcountry camp was a higher meadow that we visited almost every day, morning and/or evening. In this unusually wet year the meadow was green and full of wildflower, with water running strongly in the creek and the areas around the tarn muddy with standing run-off.

The meadow and its flowers were the first attractions of this spot, but the more I visited it and watched the light on the higher peaks, the more they came to fascinate me. The central peak in the photograph stands apart from the main ridge, and for this reason it picks up direct sun from morning until evening. I made this photograph in the evening, when the direct light had already left the meadow (shadowed by a nearby ridge) and remnant thunder-storm clouds filled the sky.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Wildflowers, Meadow, Peaks

Image August 29, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Wildflowers carpet a meadow leading to John Muir Wilderness peaks

I made this photograph just steps from where we were camped for a week during a prior (and much wetter!) summer. If you were at this location at the end of July in a more typical year you would likely see a lot of brown beginning to appear in the meadow. But this had been a year of record-breaking winter precipitation, and everything was still green.

There were also wildflowers everywhere. (Mosquitos, too, of course — the two go hand in hand in the high country!) This is something of an unusual composition for me, with a wide-angle lens placing the very close flowers in the same frame with the very distant alpine ridge standing in bright morning light against a perfect blue sky.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Sierra Light, Reflection

Image August 25, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First light on a backcountry Sierra Nevada lake and ridge

This is an older photograph that I recently came across as I went back through old image files. (I do this from time to time, and I invariably find something that I missed the first time around. ) We were on a pack trip out of the Mammoth Lakes area and on the trail for perhaps five days, moving among a series of lakes that all were under the watchful eye of the peaks in the photograph.

I was up early and perhaps a bit disappointed in the perfectly blue sky. However, as the first dawn light struck the peaks, it produced a perfect reflection in the surface of the lake, broken only by the pair of boulders, placed here in the composition to break up the mirror-image symmetry. While clouds in the sky might have been interesting, the smooth blue gradients reflected in the water make the peaks seem to float.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: sierra

Cliff Face, Detail

Alpine Meadow and Lake, Sierra Crest

Wildflowers, Meadow, Peaks

Sierra Light, Reflection

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