By now, those of you who follow my posts have figured out that I made quite a few photographs of Lake Manly on this partly cloudy morning. I hope you’ll forgive me, but the appearance of this lake is not an everyday event, and I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity. (Not only did I photograph it a lot on this trip, but I also photographed it two months earlier at the end of December.)
Continue reading Morning Reflections, Lake Manly Shoreline
This is a bit of an odd post for this site. While updating older photographs and posts I was unable to locate this one. So I’m sort of semi/maybe/kind of reposting it. The photograph comes from almost two decades ago on one of my many visits to the Big Sur Coastline of California. This visit was on a late-spring day when fog was clearing from coastal bluffs and the surf was active.
Continue reading Big Sur Coast Near Hurricane Point
It looks like I’m finally coming to the end of this season’s Death Valley Photographs. But there were quite a few, many featuring Lake Manly, the temporary lake flooding Badwater Basin. When the lake appears after a wet year it gives us an unusual opportunity in this desert landscape — to photograph reflected sky and mountains where we would usually see a salt flat.
Continue reading Morning Sky, Edge of Lake Manly
By the time I made this photograph, the dramatic very early morning light had dissipated, and it was all about blue sky, distant mountains, and fascinating morning clouds. The idea in this image was to move as close to the water as possible to create a photograph that was almost entirely sky and its reflected image. The wedge of mountains serves as visual distance to break up the sky features.
It was not necessary to wade into the water to make this photograph. It was enough to position my tripod at the water’s edge and use an appropriate focal length. That brings up a bit of a issue I have with some folks who photograph here. While I, along with probably dozens of other photographers, were working this scene one photographer waded way out into the shallow lake and stayed there for a long time. If that had produced some photographic opportunity that was unavailable from the shoreline I might have been a bit sympathetic — but it didn’t, and it only interfered with the efforts of all the other photographers. Don’t be that photographer!
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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email
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