Tag Archives: snow

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Tungsten Hills, Buttermilk Country, and the Sierra Crest

March 4, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Layers of terrain including Owens Valley sagebrush, the Tungsten Hills, Buttermilk Country, and the Sierra Crest including Basin Mountain, Mount Humphreys, and Mount Emerson.

In some ways this is a very typical eastern Sierra Nevada scene but in others, some of which might not be immediately obvious, it is atypical. I made the photograph while on my way to Death Valley in early January 2012. I had done the long drive over Tioga Pass (a first hint about the “unusual” issue) and was headed south to where I would turn east to cross the Inyo Range to that park. As I descended the long grade from Tom’s Place toward Bishop I passed through familiar Round Valley, but this little scene of sagebrush, Sierra foothills, and the crest caught my attention so I quickly stopped and made a few photographs.

The first and primary unusual thing about this photograph is that this was January! In a typical January the peaks here would be completely buried in winter snows – but this January the snowpack brought to mind mid-July. Although the season had started with early and heavy snows in October, things came to an abrupt halt and at this point it had been a month since real snow had fallen. A second slightly unusual thing is that I made this photograph in the mid-afternoon time frame. This is not a time typically regarded as being conducive to landscape photography. However, the high backlight was making the bluish haze more visible and the light was softened a bit by the high clouds, so I went ahead and made a photograph that, I hope, captures the somewhat harsh and dry conditions of the area and the season.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: People, Photographs: Yosemite

Tenaya Lake, January 2012

March 2, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Skaters and walkers on frozen Tenaya Lake, accessible via the still-open Tioga Pass Road on January 16, 2012.

I have been meaning to post this photograph since I made it last month, on January 16, 2012. The serious California drought (or so it seems) of 2012 created very unusual conditions in the Sierra this winter. The Tioga Pass Road (highway 120) through Yosemite National Park usually closes by some time in November, and has been known to close as early as October. The early season this year made it appear that we might have a normal or even heavier than normal winter – early storms near the beginning of October brought a lot of snow to the range and temporarily closed the road more than once. But by December it became clear that this was not going to be a normal year at all, and by the end of the month there was almost no snow anywhere in the range.

A week before this visit I had crossed and re-crossed the pass on a trip to Death Valley. While I appreciated the convenience and shorter drive, I found the odd conditions unnerving. Aside from a few patches here and there, I saw no snow at all, though the seasonal cold had frozen the high country lakes. A week later it looked like a storm or two might finally arrive, so we decided to make the trip up to the Tuolumne area to see the high country in a state that we probably (hopefully!) won’t see again. During the week before this visit, local news stations around California had made this story well known, and they almost all mentioned that people were visiting Tenaya Lake. And, indeed, there were tons of people at the lake when we arrived. There were about as many cars as you might see on an August afternoon. People were clustered along the frozen edge of the lake, were walking along its borders, even setting up tables for picnics on the ice. A few people thought to bring ice skates and they were skating great distances. (Fortunately for us, most people went no farther than Tenaya, and the crowds decreased rapidly after that point.)

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Wildlife

Snow Goose Maelstrom

February 24, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A swirling mass of snow geese taking flight above Skagit Valley, Washington.

(You may need to look at this one for a moment in order to understand what is going on.) I photographed these birds in what I believe Washingtonians might refer to as the “Lower Skagit River Valley” area of Washington. I visited the Seattle Area in mid-February, and managed to get one full day to drive up to Skagit Valley and look for the famous birds that are found there: snow geese, trumpeter swans, bald eagles, and more. I arrived there just before dawn on a cloudy and drizzly morning. Not really knowing the area, at first I wasn’t exactly certain where to look. I started just outside of the town of Conway, where fresh green fields occasionally held groups of trumpeter swans, though they all turned out to be a bit too far away for effective photography. Soon I decided to continue on the road out of Conway, driving in the general direction of Laconner and Anacortes. About half way between Conway and Anacortes, the road crosses a large bridge over the river through a forested area. Just before this bridge, I found my geese! As I approached I caught (thrilling) sight of airborne birds heading toward and landing in a field, so I pulled over and began photographing them. There were many thousands of snow geese, mixed in with some trumpeter swans and a few odd ducks.

As I have photographed the migratory birds this season, mostly in California’s Central Valley, one of the ideas that I got in my head was to photograph the massive flocks as they take off, using longer shutter speeds to create some motion blur and long focal lengths to compress the flocks. So, after making a few photographs at more normal and reliable shutter speeds, I switched to an unusually low shutter speed for a hand held 400mm lens and prepared for the inevitable lift off of the flock. I didn’t have to wait long. As the flock, with its edge barely more than 50 feet away from me, lifted off all at once, I used the long lens to crop closely and tracked the flock as it rose and expanded. While the initial impression of the resulting photograph might be “lots of blurry stuff!,” a closer look begins to reveal some detail and order in the madness, and individual birds can be isolated from the background blur. For the interpretation I had in mind, additional work was needed in the post-processing phase, including some work to control the blur and find edges, and some overall adjustments to dynamic range and color.

Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Wildlife

Snow Geese in Motion

February 23, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A subtle abstraction of motion-blurred snow geese in the sky over Skagit Valley, Washington.

In the second half of February I had the opportunity to spend four days in the Pacific Northwest, in and around the Seattle area. It seemed that there were two wildlife events taking place – both involving birds. The one that was getting the most attention was the snowy owls up in, if I understood correctly, the Vancouver, BC area. For a variety of reasons that subject was not going to be on my itinerary for this trip. The other was the trumpeter swans and snow geese that were settling in the lower Skagit Valley, roughly between Conley and Laconner. I did manage to spend the better part of an entire day there photographing these birds, along with a few others including bald eagles.

I arrived in the area very early, at just about the time of what would have been sunrise had it not been raining lightly. As I drove out of Conley I began to see the trumpeter swans here and there on the bright green winter fields. But despite some serious wandering about on rural side roads, I was not able to get close enough to them to make photographs. So I moved on, soon coming to a closed produce market alongside the road near fields and just before the road crossed the nearby river on a bridge through the woods. Here, at a curve in the road, I spotted many thousands of snow geese just across a drainage ditch and not far from the roadway. I pulled over and set up and watched as even more birds began to arrive, until the largest flock of geese that I have even seen was assembled in this empty field. Then, for some reason I could not discern, the entire group of thousands and thousands of geese spontaneously and en masse rose up into the air. Fortunately, I had been thinking about this possibility and an idea I had to photograph them with a long lens and at slow shutter speeds, and I was already at the right shutter speed and had the long lens on the camera. It was mostly a matter of aiming straight into the thickest part of the flock and trying to keep some eye on the background patterns as the geese rose into the air. I took this photograph from the set since it was almost entirely filled with geese and used it as a starting point to do a bit of additional post-processing to produce the interpretation of the photograph that you see here.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: snow

Tungsten Hills, Buttermilk Country, and the Sierra Crest

Tenaya Lake, January 2012

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