Tag Archives: spring

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

Bixby Bridge, Pacific Coast Highway

April 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Pacific Coast Highway winds along the rugged California Big Sur coastline at Bixby Bridge

This is a pretty classic view of the California coastline, including a well-known section of the Pacific Coast Highway (route 1) below Monterey in the northern section of the Big Sur coast. Shot from high on bluffs above the ocean, where the highway climbs to one of its high points, the photograph looks north up the coast across pastureland on the foreground bluff towards the famous Bixby Bridge, located in the surf-filled cove just beyond. More bluffs and ridges dropping to the sea fade into the distant haze beyond that.

This was a beautiful spring day, so I got up very early and was in the Monterey area as the sun came up. The conditions were not quite what I expected. I knew that it was supposed to be windy, so I was expecting very clear conditions. The sky was clear of clouds, but there was quite a bit of low atmospheric haze – it almost looked like it wanted to be fog but couldn’t quite get it together to form clouds. This light does difficult things to colors, but it also creates an interesting contrast between the relatively clear closer objects and further subjects desaturated by the haze. It was also windy – very windy by the time I stopped shooting late in the morning.

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: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Trillium Flower and Leaves

March 28, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A single trillium flower grows in the redwood forest of Muir Woods National Monument

I was brought up mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. (I like to describe myself as a “virtual native” of California, since I’ve lived here since I was four years old.) When I was a child my parents would often – or so it seemed to me – bundle us into the family car for day trips to many of the nearby areas where I photograph on day trips today: Point Lobos, Pinnacles National Monument (now National Park), San Francisco, Big Basin State Park. One of the main attractions of Big Basin is the presence of coast redwood trees. I suppose that because I’ve always known trees this large that they don’t shock me the way that they do visitors who haven’t seen them before – but every once in a while I realize just how remarkable their size is.

However, with all of my youthful visits to redwood forests, it seems odd to admit that I never saw the trillium flowers there until I was much older. In retrospect, I’m pretty certain that visiting such places was a warm weather event in my family – and trillium blossoms appear at a time of the year when things are still distinctly wet and chilly. Now I try to see them every late winter and early spring, and to photograph them if possible. With this goal, I made a one day trip to the redwoods of Marin County north of San Francisco last week, making sure to arrive very early, before the hordes of tourist buses would arrive from nearby San Francisco. I managed to get a couple of hours in the deep early morning shade of the redwood forest to photograph these flowers before the sun and the other visitors arrived, making photography less appealing. Those who may not have seen the plant in the wild might be surprised at its form. Beneath the three trios of leaves/flowers that you see in this photograph, the whole affair is supported on a single long and bare step that rises vertically from the forest floor. The flowers, which can range in color from pure white through pink to a sort of dark and dusty burgundy, don’t last long, and if you aren’t there during the short interval when they blossom you might not notice them at all.

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

Devil’s Cornfield

March 7, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Early morning light slants across the arrow weed plants of the Devil’s Cornfield area of Death Valley National Park

For the record, while I have no evidence either way regarding the role of the devil in creating this terrain, there is definitely no corn growing in this field! The plant is known as “arrowweed” (or arroweed or arrow weed), and the tall shapes are apparently formed as the sand erodes from around the roots.

This spot is one of several in Death Valley that have been hard for me to see as photographs. (Other “challenges” include the Devil’s Golf Course – which mostly looks like crusty, dried mud to me – and Salt Creek – which I’ve mostly visited at the times of day when the light hasn’t been idea.) I came close once before with a closer view of the plants that revealed their actual color a bit more and which placed them in front of a backdrop of more distant barren mountains. This photograph certainly doesn’t provide a strong center of visual interest, but I like the sense of the plants leading off into the distance, the angles of the blue shadows, and the contrasting warm colors of the plants in near golden-hour light.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Visual Puzzle with Tree

June 15, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A tree with early spring greenery against a backdrop of the reflecting windows of downtown San Francisco buildings.

On a mid-April walk though portions of downtown San Francisco to make photographs, while passing through the financial district I was these branches with new spring leaves juxtaposed with a conjunction of building angles, reflected and distorted light, and colors that created a wild abstraction.

The urban environment often holds visual attractions that are not always immediately scene and which sometimes require one to look past the more obvious grit and turmoil. (Those, too, can be a photographic subject… but not this time.) In downtown concrete canyons with glass covered buildings, there is a constantly varying world of wild distortions and conjunctions and perspectives. If you think about it, very little of what you think you see in this photograph is really “there.” The thing the fills the largest portion of the frame is a crazily distorted reflection of other building and sky, fractured and bent by the distortions from the glass – in essence you don’t really see this building at all!

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: spring

Bixby Bridge, Pacific Coast Highway

Trillium Flower and Leaves

Devil’s Cornfield

Visual Puzzle with Tree

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