Tag Archives: sky

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake

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Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake
A full autumn moon rises above Mono Lake at dusk.

Autumn Moon Rising, Mono Lake. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A full autumn moon rises above Mono Lake at dusk.

There are still a few more photographs in this series of autumn evening images from Mono Lake that I made a few years ago. These come from that pandemic photographic genre that we might call “photographs that would have been lost forever if forced isolation had not given me a great reason to look through my old files.” (Maybe you have a shorter title?) I know I’m not the only one dong this. Travel has, of course, been complicated for a year and a half. I’ve been out, and I’ve even been to Mono Lake during this interval, but the opportunities seem greatly diminished. But there are tens of thousands of raw files in my archives, and it has been productive to spend time going back through them and discovering things I had left behind. (How that happens would be a great subject for a long post sometime.)

On this autumn evening I timed by arrival at Mono Lake for right around sunset. I knew that the full moon would rise over those distant mountains east of Mono Basin, and I expected that the moon world rise while there was still some light in the sky. This is ideal in many ways, since the remaining ambient light is often colorful, it illuminates landscape details, and it reduces the contrast between the bright moon and the darker scene. In several of the photographs —working very quickly! — I used a much longer focal length to enlarge the moon. But for this one I backed off and included much more of the surrounding landscape and the lake.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Mono Lake Moonrise

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Mono Lake Moonrise
Early autumn full moon rising over Mono Lake, California.

Mono Lake Moonrise. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early autumn full moon rising over Mono Lake, California.

This is a photograph of that magical moment when an early-autumn full moon rises above the mountains to the east of Mono Lake while there is still a bit of sunset or early twilight light in the sky. I’ve experienced this here quite a few times, and I often time my arrival at this point for this hour when it is full moon time. On this evening it all worked out perfectly: intense color in the sky as the moon appeared, plus sky color reflected on the surface of the lake, interspersed with blue areas where surface turbulence broke up the reflection.

Photographing a full moon is a bit trickier than it might appear at first glance, especially if you want to include the landscape in the scene, too. Once it is dark or close to it, the difference between the light on the landscape and light of the moon is huge — the moon is essentially a daylight exposure, while that landscape is much darker. Even with a camera that had enough dynamic range to capture both of those extremes, you would either end up with a well-exposed moon and a nearly invisible landscape or a nicely exposed landscape and featureless white disk of a moon. One approach is to time the photograph so that the moon in in the sky before it is fully dark. Ideally, this means photographing the moon a bit before it is truly “full” — or photographing at a time of year when there is still light on the landscape when a truly full moon rises.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Oregon Sky

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Oregon Sky
A still lake, a band of forest shoreline, and sky with wildfire smoke in the Cascade Lakes region of Oregon.

Oregon Sky. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A still lake, a band of forest shoreline, and sky with wildfire smoke in the Cascade Lakes region of Oregon.

This, I suppose, is sort of a vacation photograph — a subject “snapped” with a handheld camera while on a hike. “Not a normal vacation snap!,” you say? Well, OK. To be honest, I’m not a very reliable family vacation photographer. I have to remind myself to make those “normal” (and important!) straightforward photographs of people and activities. And, somewhat sad to say, I came back with none of those at all from my recent family camping trip in the Cascade Lakes region of Oregon.

But I did bring this back. One morning, before joining the rest of the gang for morning camp festivities, I went for a short hike along the shoreline of Lava Lake. It was a very quiet and slow morning. I don’t think I met more than a couple of other hikes and the biggest action was the passing of a couple of kayakers. The lake was still since the day’s winds and not started yet, and there was a wildfire smoke haze in the sky. In this part of Oregon, at least on this day when the smoke obscured more distant features, the open sky dominated the landscape.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Lava Lake Shoreline

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Lava Lake Shoreline
Reflected forest along the rocky shoreline of Lava Lake, Oregon

Lava Lake Shoreline. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Reflected forest along the rocky shoreline of Lava Lake, Oregon

Today I am sharing another photograph from my family trip to Oregon this past week. Although it wasn’t primarily a photography trip, I did make a few photographs. I did head out one day with the specific intent of photographing in the Cascade Lakes area in the general area of Mt. Bachelor, but I ran into truly awful wildfire smoke. At times it was thick enough that the closest peaks were not even visible. That little photographic foray turned out to be less than fruitful… if that is an appropriate way to say that “I came back with no photographs at all!”

But one morning I was up reasonably early and most of my family members (brothers and sister and the families of their kids) were all off doing other things. So I wandered out of the campground and took a pleasant solo hike along the rocky shoreline of Lava Lake. I’m far from an expert on the geology and geography of Oregon, but I was struck by how different it is (with a few exceptions) from the California landscape that I know so well. Here, aside from the striking volcanic peaks and formations, the land has a much lower profile. In places you can travel for miles in forest (quite a bit of which has been logged) and never see much beyond the row of trees at the road’s edge. This lake, apparently like many others in this area, sits on top of a volcanic base, and the shoreline is clearly composed of volcanic rocks.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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