Tag Archives: travel

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

Evening Fog, Autumn

September 18, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Evening fog forms on an autumn evening above a ridge near Olmsted Point, Yosemite National Park.

I made this photograph on a memorable evening back in 2008 while returning to the SF Bay Area from several days of autumn aspen photography on the east side of the Sierra. After shooting aspen subjects like crazy for several days, I more or less thought that my photography for this trip was finished as I ascending Tioga Pass to enter the park on my way home. In fact, I didn’t really do much photography around the pass or at Tuolumne. But as I drove I noticed that low clouds were forming over peaks and ridges, created by condensation in very moist post-rain air as the temperature dropped quickly as sunset approached. Now this was starting to seem a bit interesting!

As I came to Olmsted Point the clouds were so thick that I couldn’t really see a thing. You never know for sure how these atmospheric conditions are going to develop, and while part of me was disappointed that perhaps there would not be a photography opportunity, another part of me (the tired part!) was almost a bit relieved that I could perhaps get on with task of driving home. But as I rounded the very next bend, where the road rises to a high point just west of Olmsted, things opened up just a bit and light from a clear area a bit further to the west was making the fog glow a bit. So, with a combination of reluctance and excitement, I pulled over, hoisted my gear, and walked off into the forest and granite landscape to make this photograph.

(After making this one, I was certain that my work was done, as the light was fading fast. As fate would have it, a mile or two further on there was a tremendous view of the fog filled valley below, in soft dusk light and with Clouds Rest looming above. Yup, had to stop one more time for that one, too…)

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Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Mono Lake, Thunderstorm

September 14, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Eastern Sierra Nevada thunderstorms build over Mono Lake, Mono Craters, and Lee Vining, California.

Mono Lake can be an unforgiving place in which to try to make photographs during the day, but sometimes one gets lucky! It is a wonderful place, but if you only know it from photographs – which, of course, tend to be made at the most appealing times – you might not know that it is often hot and hazy and dry during the day. These are among the reasons that it is a place often photographed at dawn or at sunset on days when the clouds are interesting. (The latter poses its own set of problems, since the Sierra Nevada range begins to block the light well before actual sunset.)

But I did get lucky on this late July afternoon. It was thunderstorm weather, so there were some very impressive clouds floating around. However, the clouds did not completely fill the sky, so patches of light were moving across the landscape – in this photograph one illuminates the green area at far right along the shore and, more importantly, the Mono Craters beyond the far shore of the lake. And the vegetation around the lake was still green, or at least green enough to look alive in this light.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Bridge, Olympic Sculpture Park

September 13, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A bridge crosses railroad tracks at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Washington.

Back in 2008 I travelled to Seattle on mostly family business. I arrived a bit early and ended up spending some time wandering around the Olympic Sculpture Park, a place I enjoy both for the art and for the architecture and other features of this public space.

The bridge across the railroad tracks had interested me previously, but I’ve found it a difficult subject to photograph – somewhat surprisingly, since it seems to me like such an obvious thing to photograph. So in this image I more or less obscured most of the bridge itself, leaving not much more than the white vertical supports along its exterior and its overall shape and mass. I thought that the relationships between the texture of the metal bridge and the concrete underneath was interesting, as were some of the relationships between various shapes and angles. As I have done in a few other recent photographs, I played around with “pure” color and black and white renditions of the image – in the end deciding to sort of split the difference, thinking that a somewhat de-saturated color image might be most in line with my memory of the place and the scene on that winter day.

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

Siesta Lake, Summer

September 4, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The middle of a summer day at Siesta Lake, Yosemite National Park.

And, surprise!, yet another photograph dredged up from the archives during my summer crawl through the past eight years of raw files.

Siesta Lake is probably well-known to almost anyone who has driven across Tioga Pass Road (highway 120) from west to east through Yosemite National Park. As the road ascends from into the higher elevations, at one point it rounds a turn and there on the right is this pretty and peaceful little lake, right next to the road, surrounded by trees and boulders, and often with water lilies floating on its surface. Few can resist a quick stop, unless they are in a real hurry or have stopped there many times before. I’ve stopped there lots of times, but I still do pull over for at least a quick look.

This photograph of the lake is a bit unusual for me in a couple of ways. For one thing, it was made during the middle of the day, during those hours that are not supposed to be conducive to photography – and, in fact, which can be very challenging. But on this day there was a thin layer of overcast broken by thicker clouds, and this somewhat muted the midday intensity of the light. In addition, I think that I most often work close views of the grasses and, especially, the flowers growing in the lake – but here I stood back a bit and took in everything from the foreground to the trees on the opposite shore. Finally, the vast majority of photographs I’ve made here are in landscape (wide) orientation, with some even going all the way to 2:1 panoramic formats and beyond.

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