Tag Archives: travel

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Crumbling Ghost Town Ruins, Evening

December 8, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light in the crumbling ruins of an old mining ghost town near Death Valley National Park, California.

Rhyolite is a Nevada ghost town not far from Death Valley National Park. (The bit of distant ridge seen through the “windows” of the structure is probably inside the park.) The story of Rhyolite is interesting, and not all that different from what happened in many other “boom and bust” towns in the desert and in other areas of the west. For a short time, thousands showed up to work in extractive industries, otherwise known as mines, and there was apparently an actual bustling city here. The old railroad station, ruins of bank buildings and a school, and the size of the area occupied by the town are evidence of this. But, as is virtually always the case, the boom couldn’t last and the departed inhabitant left some years ago, leaving the town to the elements.

This is a different sort of Rhyolite photograph than I might usually share. Most are made either at night or in the golden hour period near dawn. This one was made in the evening, when the direct sun was gone. (At this time of year the sun sets beyond a nearby ridge, so the direct light is gone well before sunset.) The soft, bluish evening light creates a different effect and, for me, makes the old buildings a bit more mysterious. Here I shot from outside one of the crumbling structures that is now filled with rocks. I don’t usually say much about what a photograph might mean (and often my photographs are simply what they are) but this one evoked for me some thoughts about the nature of time and the transitory effect of the human presence on the landscape. Not only has this building – which at one time must have had a floor, a roof, a nicely finished interior, and perhaps even comfortable furniture and perhaps art on the walls – decayed to the point where the line between its structure and the rocks of the natural landscape becomes obscure, but even the attempts to declare ones presence by means of graffiti have begun to crumble.

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

Tuolumne River Below Glen Aulin, Morning

November 27, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Early light on morning clouds above the Tuolumne River Canyon below Glen Aulin, Yosemite National Park.

This is the same bend in the Tuolumne River, located below Glen Aulin and before the river descends toward Waterwheel Falls and eventually the abomination of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, that was shown in a photograph of late afternoon light that I posted here a few days ago. This time it was early morning. We had been up well before sunrise and had wandered off in various directions to find early morning photographic subjects. My main goals were the cascading water along the edge of this section of the river (a bit of which is visible in the lower portion of the frame) and a granite bowl to the right of this view. As I came over the rise above this area before descending I saw the beautiful sparse clods to the west, probably extending to the edge of the Sierra and still with pastel colors from dawn light.

A technical observation about this photograph. This scene presented a technical challenge in the form of an extremely wide dynamic range between the bright and red-saturated first direct sunlight on the ridge at upper left and the much darker areas of forest in shade along the river and in the foreground. With a digital exposure, in a scene like this one, the primary rule for me is “don’t blow out the highlights.” If I had overexposed the sky the clouds would have turned into pure white, texture-free blotches and that bit of early sun on the rocks would have lost detail and taken on a very strange coloration. However, an exposure that protects the highlights in a scene like this one can leave the shadows nearly black. While it is possible to “fix” that a bit in post, the result is not necessarily very good when the dynamic range is very large. One “traditional” solution would have been to use a graduated neutral density filter (or “GND”) that blocked some of the brightest areas at the top of the frame while not affecting the lower 2/3 or so. But I don’t use them, and in this case the result would not have been totally wonderful since the same filtering that would reduce sky brightness would also make the large granite dome at the right end up nearly black at the top.

So instead of filtering at the time of exposure, I decided that I would use the roughly comparable, but more flexible, “exposure blending” techniques in post. With that in mind I made several photographs at different exposures – some at shorter shutter speeds to avoid the blown out highlights and others at increasingly slower shutter speeds to reveal the shadow detail that my eyes could see but which the camera otherwise could not. During the post-production phase, I selected two of the exposures, one that was as bright as possible but without blowing out the sky and sunlight, and the other two stops lighter to reveal that shadow detail in a way that seemed consistent with what I recall the scene actually looked like. The two source images were carefully adjusted during raw conversion and their two layers carefully aligned. With the darker image (the one with the “good” sky) on the top, I began to “paint” out the mask to reveal the details of the foreground forest, river, and rocks. (In answer to the expected question, this is not the same as HDR. That is a more or less automated process that works in a different way. Exposure blending is typically a manual process that relies a great deal on the photographers judgment and recall of the actual scene.)

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

Dissipating Storm Clouds, Sunset

November 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Sunset light on dissipating thunderstom clouds above granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

Late on this September afternoon in the Yosemite back-country I had a good idea that something might happen around sunset, but I could not have known in advance just how intense the cloud color would turn out to be. The set-up was classic. Thunder storms had built up throughout the afternoon, and by late in the day I would see and hear large storms to my north and east – though I remained right on the edge of the storm potential as I was a bit further west. As evening approached the cloud-building forces began to diminish, leaving the tops of the larger cells unsupported, and they began to thin and stretch westward, curving up and over my location along the Tuolumne River.

Knowing that interesting light of one sort or another was probable, I walked to an area of granite slabs and bowls that I had photographed when visiting this area at the start of my trip nearly a week earlier. As I considered a few photographs of the granite and trees in that area, my attention kept being drawn to the sky. At first it remained a relatively low contrast mass of gray, though the thinning clouds started to allow views through falling virga towards more distant clouds that rose into the sunlight. Then, as the sun dropped and the foreground lost the direct light, the clouds began to light up and take on wildly saturated colors. (A technical note: in many of the photographs, though not in this one, the dynamic range between cloud highlights and foreground was so large that it required multiple exposures separated by up to five stops to capture it all!)

I moved to the base of the granite bowl in which I had photographed rocks and small trees a week before when I saw these spectacular clouds building to the north west. The color was simply unbelievable – and you can see that the intense saturated light was not just in the sky, but that it also colored the granite near the bottom of the image. For this photograph I used a short focal length to try to take in a large section of the flowing and wildly shaped and colored clouds.

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

Tree and Stained Granite

November 17, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small tree grows from a crack in red-stained granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

Back in mid-September of this year I joined a group of five other photographers for a bit more than a week of photography in the High Sierra back-country of Yosemite National Park, going out along the Tuolumne River and spending some significant time in two locations and having several days to photograph at each of them. The first few days were spent along the Tuolumne in a place where a short hike led to a beautiful bowl of smooth granite slabs interrupted by some trees and stained by seepage from a band of reddish rocks above. In some ways this might have seemed like a tricky spot to photograph since it is in the bottom of a canyon and the light is blocked to the east and somewhat blocked to the west. But I like the indirect light found in shaded areas after dawn and before sunset, so I went back to this area on at least three days to photograph in this diffused, soft light.

The rocks are part of a large area of granite slabs that this non-geologist assumes were carved and smoothed by glaciers traveling down from the peaks above the Tuolumne area. In this spot the formations include large areas of smooth and curved granite surfaces, areas that have been pock-marked by erosion and water, cracks of various sizes ranging from incipient to gigantic, and trees and other plants growing anywhere they can find footing: tiny cracks, larger cracks like this one, collections of sand and debris in low spots, and so on. I came back to this tree and some of its neighbors several times and came to think of it as the “bonsai tree.”

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: travel

Crumbling Ghost Town Ruins, Evening

Tuolumne River Below Glen Aulin, Morning

Dissipating Storm Clouds, Sunset

Tree and Stained Granite

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