Tag Archives: travel

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Marin Hills Fog

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Marin Hills Fog
Pacific ocean fog drifts among forested ridges north of San Francisco.

Marin Hills Fog. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pacific ocean fog drifts among forested ridges north of San Francisco.

This is a reworking/rethinking of an older photograph from 2013. The previous interpretation was black and white — at that time I was shying away from cloudy, foggy images with a blue cast, but I’ve come to accept and like them now. (Going to black and white is often an attractive option when I can’t quite see how to make it work in color.) Somewhat unusual for me, I also may have darkened some elements of this version of the image. Perhaps a bit of darkness seems appropriate in this time of sheltering-in-place…

I made the photograph on a quick day trip across the Golden Gate Bridge and a ways north up the coast. My recollection is that I followed coastal roads up to about Stinson Beach, stopped there to grab a a bite, and then decided to take a hillier route back home. It reached a sufficient elevation to get me up onto the shoulder of a ridge where I was above the bank of fog extending back out over the Pacific Ocean.

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 and Amazon.

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

Twin Leaves

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Twin Leaves
“Twin Leaves” — Two autumn aspen leaves in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.

Continuing the countdown to the end of this year’s batch of Eastern Sierra fall aspen color, here is another vertical format close-up of a pair of beautiful leaves, photographed in the soft light of a colorful grove still in the morning shadows of a nearby ridge. This soft light filled in the shadows, lowered the contrast, and produced lovely saturated colors.

These leaves, here mostly positioned against a background of very out of focus trees with a few leaves around the edge, are illustrative of what I found during by brief fall color foray this year — a whole lot of great color and more reds and oranges than I usually encounter.

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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

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.

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

Backlit Aspen Leaves

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Backlit Aspen Leaves
“Backlit Aspen Leaves” — Eastern Sierra autumn aspen leaves against a splash of background color.

At this point I now appear to be down to just four more of my 2020 autumn aspen color photographs from the Eastern Sierra Nevada, and all of them are up-close photographs of just a few leaves like this one. As I have written previously, my opportunities to get to the Sierra to photograph the aspens this fall were limited by pandemic-related travel issue and by the historically bad wildfires in California. However, on my brief visit I encountered really wonderful color, some of the best I’ve seen in years — and in the end I came back with more photographs than I would have expected from such a short visit.

Almost all of this year’s close-up leaf photographs were made during a short, slow ramble through a single grove that I’ve visited for years. It is a place where I often stop to photograph the smaller elements of the autumn scene, though I managed to arrive just in time for a very special color display this season, with abundant leaves in every possible variation of aspen color. The intention underlying the composition of this photograph was to highlight the two mostly-red leaves and to contrast them with the out-of-focus mass of yellower leaves in the background.

Leave a comment or question using the form. (If you are reading this on the home page, click the article title to see the full article and the comment form.

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

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.

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

Yellow and Orange

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Yellow and Orange
A river of orange and yellow autumn aspen trees flows down to the shoreline of a Sierra Nevada lake.

Yellow and Orange. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A river of orange and yellow autumn aspen trees flows down to the shoreline of a Sierra Nevada lake.

This will be (I’m virtually certain!) the final photograph of the larger landscape of 2020 from this Eastern Sierra Nevada location in the Inyo National Forest, a spot that is arguably perhaps too iconic at this point. How did I end up here again, you ask? This was not my original objective when I headed over the crest in early October, but the wildfire smoke essentially corralled me into this canyon system — my intended locations were simply way too smoky for photography or for camping. Planning is useful in landscape photography… but so is adaptability and a readiness to make the best of the conditions at hand!

It turned out — my good fortune! — that the aspen colors here were close to their peak and that it was a better than usual year, with colors running the gamut from green, through yellow and orange, to red. The colors in this little scene include that full range, with deep greens from conifers, subtle yellows on the lakeside bushes, and the full span from yellow to red among the aspens. And, by the way, while my landscape photographs of Eastern Sierra aspens are more or less done for the season… I do have a few more close-up photographs of the colorful leaves.

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 and Amazon.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

Scroll down to leave a comment or question.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.