“Stick in the Mud” — Dead branches on a bed of dried and fractured mud, Death Valley.
As always, cracked desert mud turns out to be an irresistible subject. I photographed this little patch in the northern portion of Death Valley. We arrived as broken clouds were developing, and that gave us varied light as shadows moved across the landscape. I made this photograph in the “in between” light — not full sun, but strong enough to be directional. The mud patterns are interrupted by the pieces of old wood, but that’s not all to notice in this little scene. Look closely and you’ll see a variety of spring plants beginning to grow in this seemingly-barren terrain.
“James Smith & Sons” — James Smith and Sons umbrella, whip, and stick shop, London.
During our early June visit to London we were lucky to be able to spend time with our oldest son, Brandon, who was there for a few days after a work visit. It is wonderful to meet up with your grown “kids” in such a place — for all the usual reasons, but also because sometimes they have new and different ways of orienting themselves to the local environment. At his suggestion and in his company we visited a number of places that we would not have seen. The James Smith & Sons shop, which I might otherwise have walked past with little notice, was one of them.
I’ll start with the obvious — you don’t find many shops in the US that were established nearly two centuries ago! The fascinating signs on the exterior are not just some kind of marketing — that’s actually what they have looked like for a long time. Inside, this is a classical shopping experience. Beautiful umbrellas, waling sticks, canes, folding stools, and more, at prices from reasonable to astronomical, fill the shop. Clerks talk to customers, going into great detail about the products. I came “this close” to buying something “just because,” and now I almost regret that I didn’t.
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.
A fallen flower rests lies on a bed of old leaves and sticks.
Special Note: Patty and I are presenting a Silicon Valley Open Studios event on May 21 and 22. Look us up there or contact us for more information. Come and see our prints!
As I have written previously, as I photograph one subject I often am also on the lookout for other things that might make a photograph. As we fixate on our primary subject — quite important! — we risk missing other subjects lurking in the neighborhood. The old advice was “always look behind, too” — that’s a reminder look up, look down, look over, look under, look everywhere. You will probably find something interesting.
We were at a large public garden full of spectacularly beautiful spring flower displays. I mostly photographed colorful flowers, but I also poked around a bit. Some time ago I began looking underneath the plants that provide the main show, especially in gardens like this one where interesting things fall to the ground and lie unnoticed in the soft shadows. This flower had reached a poignant stage — it retained its color and shape but had been discarded in the litter beneath the bushes where it was beginning to decay.
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.
The broken branches of a fallen tree on the ground in the back-country of Yosemite National Park.
These branches belong to what is left of a tree that fell in the area around our campsite in the north east section of the back-country of Yosemite National Park. On a couple of mornings during the time we were there doing photography, I began my morning by wandering a bit through this section of forest, meadow, and dried-up ponds, looking for whatever little miniature landscapes I might find.
Dried and broken branches of fallen and dead trees intrigue me, though they can make very difficult subjects to photograph. Light and color are tricky – too much light and it is difficult to get shadow detail without washing out the highlights; too little light and the subject can go flat and pick up blue tones. And sometimes the patterns are so complex and disorganized as to nearly defy my efforts to make any sort of compositional sense out of them.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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