Tag Archives: sierra

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Forest, Morning, Autumn Color

October 25, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early morning autumn colors in the underbrush of a Yosemite forest.

I like to visit Yosemite National Park every year around Halloween, when fall colors often peak in Yosemite Valley — including oaks, dogwood, cottonwood, big leaf maple, and more. This year I went a bit earlier — slightly more than a week before the end of October — since I wanted to drop in on a gallery opening reception in Oakhurst, for the last hurrah of the 2017 Yosemite Renaissance exhibit, which includes one of my photographs. I went up on the day of the opening, starting in Yosemite Valley. I spent the day photographing, but also marveling at the astoundingly huge number of people who were crowding the place. I try to avoid The Valley in the summer, especially on weekends, but I figured that October wouldn’t be so bad. I was wrong! In any case, by going away from the most popular places and a few other strategies, I was able to find some relative solitude.

I stayed in Oakhurst than night and then got up well before dawn the next morning. My loose plan was to head toward Glacier Point for sunrise, but I was sidetracked along the way — first by these fall colors and later by the opportunity to photograph a forest covered with wildfire smoke. Regarding that color, I already knew that there can be a lot of beautiful color along the road between Oakhurst and the Valley, and that it can be especially beautiful very early in the morning, when there are few people and the direct sunlight has still not arrived. I found this spot that I had scoped out the previous day, and I paused for some photography. Subjects like this are about as far from “iconic” as one can be, but they often evoke deeper associations with the feelings of such places than photographs of another popular mountain. As I made this photograph it was quiet, still, and cold, and the pre-dawn light was filtering down into the darkened forest. The colorful underbrush was the first thing I saw, but soon I realized the quiet beauty of the tall trees in this burned-over area as they marched up the hill toward the light.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspens and Conifers

October 24, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Fall color before sunrise in the Eastern Sierra Nevada

I had visited this place a few days earlier on a separate visit, and at that time the colors were still not fully developed. At that time I wasn’t sure I would be back, since I have photographed this area quite a few times in the past, and I figured that my subsequent visit might take me to different areas of the Sierra. However, I’m an opportunist and I often make decisions about where I’ll go and what I’ll photograph quite close to the last minute, responding to circumstances and conditions. And on this morning, a visit to this spot looked promising.

Each year the color change patterns are a bit different. A spot that might be green one year on a particular date may be in full color during another year, or it might simply lose its leaves without changing. While things tend to happen at fairly similar times each year — with some exceptions — the state of the trees at those points in time can vary. For example, I have come to this spot at about this time and found the lower portion of the grove almost devoid of leaves, likely in the aftermath of cold and wind. This time the color still looked good, thought I could tell that at the lower edges it wasn’t going to last a lot longer. I as also intrigued by the somewhat unusual band of green trees still found in the bottom of the ascending gully.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Groves, Early Evening

October 21, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early evening light on aspen groves with fall color, Eastern Sierra Nevada

As with virtually all locations with fall color, especially the fall color of aspen trees, timing (and/or good luck about timing!) is everything. There are so many variables that can make or break a photograph of autumn color, and some of them are beyond our control. Precisely when does the color peak in a specific location? What are the effects of the preceding months of weather, from winter snows and summer rains to the temperature patterns? What about preceding days of weather — has it snowed, how cold has it been, have there been strong winds? On the day of the photograph, what are the clouds doing? Are you there at the ideal time of day — perhaps a time when there is some backlight on the trees and other distracting elements are perhaps less well-lit?

Sometimes it all comes together — or close enough — and you find a scene with beautiful color, few trees that have completely lost their leaves, perhaps a bit of green remaining, the light in the right place, and more. For what I was after I had a window of only a few minutes to make this photograph. You may have noticed that the evening shadow has already reached the very bottom of the frame, but that the light has softened and warmed enough to bring out the color in the trees. But what you cannot see in the photograph is that I came to this same location two prior times over the period of a week, one of them the previous night. On those visits it did not work quite right — clouds covered the sky, it was hazy, too many trees were green, near gale force winds were blowing, and more. A rule of landscape photography is that the more chances you give yourself, the greater the odds that you’ll be there when the elements all happen to fall together.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Edge of the Meadow

October 19, 2017 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

High elevation trees at the edge of a subalpine meadow, with alpine peaks beyond

As often happens at busy photographic times of the year, I have a set of projects that I’m working on simultaneously right now. Some come from photography I have done as recently as the current week, while other come from work that I did as long as a couple of months ago. Along those lines, I still am working on photographs from our late-August and early September visit to a special Sierra Nevada backcountry location, where a group of us spent more than a week base-camped near a region with an unbelievable wealth of photographic subjects to explore. Today’s photograph comes from that trip.

We were camped for more than a week at a lake just a bit lower in elevation than the location of this photograph. On almost every day we visiting this general area, either focusing on it as the subject or passing by it on our way to other higher places. On this day I had gotten up rather early and explored the area as the first sunlight began to fall on the distant peaks, the meadow, and the trees surrounding it. My recollection is that this was probably one of the last photographs of the morning before I headed back to base-camp, and I’m certain that we were close to the conclusion of our trip. The foreground meadow was typically our main subject here. When we arrived a week from the end of August we were surprised to find it still completely green and filled with wildflowers. The flowers were still there when I made this photograph, but already the late-summer brown meadow color was appearing.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: sierra

Forest, Morning, Autumn Color

Aspens and Conifers

Aspen Groves, Early Evening

Edge of the Meadow

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