Tag Archives: small

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Autumn Cottonwood Tree

Image April 9, 2026 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Although it has been more than a decade since I made this photograph (yes, another “lost and found” photo), I have distinct memories of the circumstances surrounding it. That fall I spent a few weeks exploring the Southern Utah landscape, from the backcountry of Grand Staircase-Escalante to several national parks. Sometimes I photographed alone, but along the way I met up with various friends, relatives, and photographers.

A photographer friend and I camped for several days at Capitol Reef National Park. We explored areas near the campground. (Yes, we tried the pie…) But one day we took a longer trip into the park’s backcountry. At the end of the day we returned to the campground, and just before we arrived we stopped to photograph these autumn trees against a red rock wall.

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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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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

One Small Tree

Image January 12, 2026 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The massive layers of red sandstone in the American Southwest are impressive. But seeing that plants manage to live on these formations is equally so. The variety of ways they eke out a living is surprising — at the bottom of huge holes in the rock, in tiny cracks, along ledges. Here a small tree adds a contrasting bit of green to the sandstone cliff.

Of course, this is not something that is unique to The Southwest. As a long time Sierra Nevada visitor I still marvel at mature trees that seem to grow almost straight out of rock, sometimes in very exposed positions high in the mountains. It seems to take little to provide enough sustenance — a crack that collects some other plant debris and a little water will do it. Before long, little plant and animal communities spring up beneath these trees.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Cottonwood Trunks, Autumn

Image November 2, 2025 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

About a decade ago I took a long autumn photography trip to Southern Utah. I started in Kanab, then headed up to Capitol Reef before backtracking to Grand Staircase-Escalante, making a quick visit to Boulder and then visiting Zion. Whew! This holograph comes from my visit to Capitol Reef, where I met up with a photographer-friend to spend a few days poking around and making photographs.

If I remember correctly, we had spent the day of fin a fairly remote part of the park, and late in the afternoon we headed back toward the campground at Fruita. It was getting late, but there was still decent light when we spotted autumn foliage on trees at the base of sandstone cliffs along a creek. I was fascinated by the undulating forms of these cottonwood trunks.

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

Small Aspen, Trunks, and Rocks

Image October 19, 2025 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

As a fall color photograph, this is a bit subtler than some of the others I have recently shared. Instead of walls of brilliantly colorful aspen groves we have a single small tree along with a few other even “quieter” bits of autumn color. But the truth, of course, is that autumn in the Sierra is mostly not about those aspens, as spectacular as they are. The arrival of autumn with drying meadows, old leaves on the ground, and more is subtle but undeniable.

This little vignette is along a rock wall high in an Eastern Sierra canyon. The route is, for a distance, lined with rocks and with aspens that grow at their base and from cracks in the rock. I pass by here every autumn and inevitably stop to photograph — so these trees and rocks are “old friends” of mine at this point.