Tag Archives: trail

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

East Side of Bishop Pass

January 8, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Trail and meadows below the east side of Bishop Pass, eastern Sierra Nevada range.

This photograph comes from about a dozen years ago. I recently came across it while sorting through older photograph files for a variety of reasons – general clearing out of old images, searching for photographs of a particular subject for a client, and seeing what older images I might have missed when I first made them. When I saw this photograph it evoked a whole series of fun recollections.

Nearly weeks earlier, I had begun a two-week-long backpack trip along a section of the John Muir Trail. At that time, the only section of the JMT that I had not hiked (at least once!) was an area between approximately Shadow Lake and the Muir Trail Ranch – and this was to be the trip on which I covered this remaining bit of trail. The trip started just fine, though in some territory that is not exactly my favorite portion of the range – the low areas around Devils Postpile. After passing by that national monument we headed south, passing Duck Lake and camping at Purple Lake.

The next morning I woke up feeling a bit under the weather, an unusual experience for me on the trail. The next leg of the trip was to take us through an area without an easy exit, and I became concerned about what would happen if my “feeling poorly” deteriorated into actually being sick. I reluctantly decided to leave my group to continue without me, and I backtracked over Duck Pass and down into the Mammoth Lakes area and headed home. (Ironically, by the time I got out I was feeling fine…)

Ending a trip this way just didn’t feel right, so I hatched a plan to show up and run into my friends on the last day of their trip. Since they were coming out over Bishop Pass, I crossed that pass into beautiful Dusy Basin a day earlier, and on the next morning hiked down the canyon so that I could be casually sitting on a rock as they came up the trail from LeConte Canyon. I have rarely seen people as surprised as they were when they found me! After our reunion and joining them for their last trail night, the next morning we were up early to hike out over Bishop Pass. This photograph was made shortly after we crossed the pass and began our descent to the trailhead.

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: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Small Tree, Shoreline Rocks

December 21, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small tree grows in a shoreline rock garden along a Sierra Nevada lake in the back-country of Yosemite National Park.

I’m posting this one because a person who posted here a week or two ago on a similar photograph asked whether I had made any photographs that included a bit more of the surface of the lake and its reflections of the forest in the distance. In fact, I had one more, and this is it.

I made this photograph and the other one in soft light at the edge of the day when no direct sunlight was in the scene at all. While this can flatten the light a bit, it also tends to fill in that shadow areas and create a less harsh sort of light. In also contributed to the interesting reflected and diffused forms of the forest along the far bank of the lake, whose vertical forms cross the horizontal forms of underwater rocks along the bottom of the lake bed.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Granite Ridge and Trees

December 9, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A backlit granite ridge above the Tuolumne River is topped by trees.

I think that this is probably going to be the final riff on the subject of this particular ridge, the subject of several photographs I have posted in recent weeks. As I probably wrote at least once before… I climbed up from our camp onto the top of a small dome-like granite whaleback that gave me an open view in almost all directions and a high point from which to look over a good section of the Tuolumne River as it passes through a section of the Yosemite back-country. I arrived at this spot in the very late afternoon and then stayed there for perhaps two hours as the light gradually shifted from that of afternoon to sunset and then twilight.

This photograph was made before the golden hour, though I think that a bit of added warmth is already beginning to appear in the color of the light. The sun was coming from above the distant ridge seen faintly through the haze above the valley of the Tuolumne, and it was periodically blocked by some high clouds. While the clouds can “blah-ify” the light pretty effectively, when they are not completely covering the sky they can cast interesting and temporary light across the landscape as they move past. For a moment the light came brightly through the clouds and back-lit these beautiful trees that were growing on the granite surface of this dome.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Granite Ridge and Trees, Afternoon Light

December 3, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon light back-lights a glaciated granite ridge partially covered with trees, Yosemite National Park.

Late in the afternoon – almost more like early evening, actually, the atmosphere at this spot along the Tuolumne River valley in the Yosemite back-country was “complex” – both challenging to shoot and full of interesting and varied potential. You might be able to see in the upper right portion of the image that a good part of the sky was obscured by a thin gray layer of high clouds, and by looking at the very faint a low contrast view of the more distant mountains at the upper left it is clear that the atmosphere was quite hazy, especially when back-lit. Yet, there is sunlight slanting across the expanse of granite and trees on the foreground ridge, and this light picks off some of these trees.

This was the kind of lighting that requires some patience. And fortunately I had gotten myself to a beautiful spot on top of a granite “whaleback” (a low and long dome-like structure) above a small side valley beyond which this ridge was arranged with the more distant ridge in the background. Most of the time the light was what I’ve heard one of my friends simply describe as “blah.” The atmosphere was a bit hazy, most of the light was obscured by the high clouds (and the haze), and even in this quite beautiful spot most of the time nothing much stood out as a photograph.

Such scenes require – and can teach – patience. It helps to find yourself alone on a granite ridge without much else to occupy your time and with no other particular task at hand. It also helps if you have learned that there is nothing at all wrong with sitting quietly in one spot for a couple of hours and simply observing. And, if you have done these things before and have observed these scenes, you know that there is a possibility that even in light and landscape that might seem a bit “blah,” there is the potential for a momentary bit of light to create something worth photographing. This was a perfect afternoon for that sort of shooting.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: trail

Small Tree, Shoreline Rocks

Granite Ridge and Trees

Granite Ridge and Trees, Afternoon Light

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