Tag Archives: silhouette

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

Dissipating Rain, Cottonwood Mountains

April 18, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The last vestiges of dissipating afternoon rain showers fall over the Cottonwood Mountains, Death Valley National Park

I have written in the past, here and elsewhere, about how I “see”—which is a very complicated subject and one that I sometime struggle to explain. (Here I think of the quote attributed to Ansel Adams: “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” Those who know me may scoff at the possibility of the “silence” part of this, but still…) One aspect of my seeing, and one that I know I share with other photographers, is that I carry around a sort of mental library of visual bits and pieces, light and color and things that I want to see and, in fact, expect to see at some point. I am aware that some of these come from far back in my memory, and I can even associate them with experiences when I was quite young. One category of these “bits and pieces” has to do with curtains of rain falling across mountain ridges. When I was quite young, my family went on a drive to Southern California and on the way we drove across an agricultural valley, and still today the image I saw of rain falling in the mountains we were about to cross is still clear in my mind as is the magical impression that it made on my young mind.

So, in a sense, this is yet another working out of that category of subjects from the mental image library. These are very different mountains from those I saw so many years ago, but the them of semi-transparent sheets of rain falling in front of mountain ridges and obscuring the details is the same. These ridges are in the Cottonwood Mountains, a sub-range of Death Valley National Park’s Panamint Range. The rarely look quite like this, being a very arid, rugged, and austere desert range. But this was a day of rain (and snow!) and late in the day, as we photographed from an elevated location out in Death Valley, the weather began to clear and the clouds dissipated, leaving behind final backlit curtains of falling rain above the mountains.

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

Desert Mountains, Rain

April 7, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Rain falling from a dissipating afternoon storm is backlit above desert mountains, Death Valley National Park

This was anything but an ordinary Death Valley day—though I’m not sure that any Death Valley day is likely to be ordinary. We began very early, awakening a couple of hours before dawn. The plan was to be far up in the Panamint Mountains before sunrise, in the hope of photographing the first light over the Valley from a high and wild place. I try to assess the weather conditions in the dark in any way that I can—checking wind, looking to see if stars are visible, and so forth. In the darkness I could tell that only a few stars were visible and that their light was muted, all of which suggested cloudiness. This was, of course, in line with a weather forecast that mentioned things like showers and snow flurries and clouds. However, you can’t tell what will happen until you go out there and watch it happen, so we headed up into the mountains.

Most of the story of this day will wait for photographs of that early morning and the rest of the day in the Panamint range that followed. However, for now I will mention that it was cloudy, it was cold, and it snowed. Later in the day the weather began to clear and we saw some sun before we came back down from the mountains, with plans for an evening shoot in a different location on our minds. As we descended we noticed precipitation in the mountains to our north and west—more or less in the Cottonwood Mountains. We stopped and photographed this weather before heading down into the Valley. Our plans were changing with the weather, and we ended up heading to a high place with a good open view of much of the Valley, figuring that the changing light from the clouds might present quickly changing opportunities. Sure enough, as soon as we arrived at our location we could see that the clouds over the Cottonwood range were quickly thinning, and that backlight was illuminating the last rain falling over the receding ridges of this range, creating a very bright and constantly changing effect.

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

Headlands, Pacific Ocean, Dusk

March 5, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dusk light silhouettes the rugged Marin headlands above the Pacific Ocean disappearing into distant haze.

On a day that began with a visit to the De Young Museum (the final weekend of the David Hockney exhibit) we ended up with some hours of free time in San Francisco… so we decided to head across the Golden Gate and try to be in position somewhere for interesting evening light. We didn’t really have a concrete plan, and we could have ended up in the headlands, along the bay, or perhaps further north along the coast. We stopped for coffee and killed a bit of time in the mid-afternoon light, and by the time we finished the early winter sunset was closer than we had expected.

Looking at the late hour (hey, it was a “vacation day!”) we realized that we didn’t have nearly as much time as we imagined, so we quickly figured out that our best bet was just to head back into the Marin Headlands on the very popular Conzelman Road – yes, the place where hundreds or thousands of people go almost every evening to watch the sun set or the fog roll in (or, sometimes, just a plain old wall of fog!) over the Golden Gate. We drove up the road and the crowds were, as expected, large enough that there were few places to park. In fact, I had to pass up a few possible photographic subjects since I could not stop. Eventually we found a place to pull over and get out and take a look. It was a pretty evening, but the view of the City was not unusually spectacular and I left my camera equipment in the car and just enjoyed the evening view and crisp air. As I stood there, I saw that the backlight over the Pacific outside the golden gate was starting to produce a beautiful diffused light over the water as the atmosphere became increasingly opaque toward the horizon. So I grabbed the tripod and camera and walked up the road a ways to make a few photographs of the ocean and the steep, rugged Marin Headlands cliffs plunging toward the edge of the water.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: People, Photographs: Photographers

Photographer, Fog

February 20, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Photographer Michael Frye at work in early morning tule fog, San Joaquin Valley

A small group of us met up on this mid-February morning to photograph migratory birds, winter fog, and the San Joaquin Valley landscape. We came from different directions, beginning our travels well before dawn so that we could meet here before sunrise. We met shortly after 6:00, exchanged greetings in the pre-dawn dark, and then got ready to shoot. I lagged behind a bit while getting gear ready, and our friends Michael and Claudia started off down the gravel road before Patty and I did. Very soon were ready to follow, and in moments we found their car parked near a grassy area.

The fog was dense but also very shallow – nearly ideal for photography since it blanketed everything in a mysterious layer but still allowed the colors of the developing dawn sky to penetrate right down to ground level and make the fog layer glow with luminous color. Michael must have seen this coming, and he was already across a grassy area and at the edge of a pond when I arrived, and he was barely visible through the fog. My first thought was to “work” this solitary tree as my primary subject as the light came up, but first I thought I’d grab a photograph of him silhouetted against the foggy landscape. I made this photograph and then walked to the edge of the pond and made my own series of photographs of the tree, the water, and the foggy atmosphere as the light passed through a range of colors that the eventually revealed higher clouds lit by the dawn sunlight.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: silhouette

Dissipating Rain, Cottonwood Mountains

Desert Mountains, Rain

Headlands, Pacific Ocean, Dusk

Photographer, Fog

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