Tag Archives: tree

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Box Elder Thicket, Fall

January 18, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A dense thicket of box elder trees along the Escalante River, Utah

Down in the canyons around the Escalante River the terrain varies a great deal. In some areas you might be walking more or less in the stream, perhaps wading up the center of the stream, crossing back and forth across it, rock hopping, and occasionally slogging through very wet sand and mud. In other areas, you might walk through groves of cottonwood or box elder trees of various sizes. Elsewhere you might leave the stream itself and find your way though brush or over and around rocks or slick rock. Sometimes there is abundant vegetation, and in other places you are in a world composed almost entirely of rock.

The river almost continuously twists back and forth and wind around one horseshoe bend after another. These bends seem to me to be important places of transition. On one side you might walk in direct sunlight and be warm. As you pass through the apex of the bend, if you were in the sun you are now likely to pass into shade and the canyon may narrow, perhaps forcing you to cross back and forth across the stream. I found this small clump of box elder trees in such a place. They were quite small – I imagine as a result of growing in an area that could be flooded from time to time – and they grew together densely. It is a challenge to try to make some sort of coherent composition out of such dense and intertwined growth. The interesting side light, reflected from another canyon wall, gave a bit of relief to the thin trunks of the trees, and there are a multitude of relationships to be found among their forms – they are mirror images of one another, or they twist almost in parallel – and in the background is such dense detail that even a very close look at a print shows that there is hardly a place where subjects beyond the trees are visible.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Rat Rock Island, Sky

January 10, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Rat Rock Island and winter sky, China Camp, California

I ended up at China Camp in connection with a “photo walk” in the San Francisco Bay Area that was devoted to long exposure photography. Photo walks have recently become quite a phenomenon, especially with the rise of Google Plus communities formed around photography. A week hardly passes around here without the announcement of another such event. Photographically they can be a bit of a mixed bag if you already know the area, but the provide fun opportunities to meet a lot of photographers of all sorts, often including a few folks you might have heard of but never met. When I go, I frequently end up shooting a bit apart from the main crowd, and that is what initially happened here… though that didn’t last!

This little island is a fairly well-known feature in the Bay Area, and I have seen beautiful photographs of it in the past. It is also not all that impressive in person, though with the right light and atmosphere it can be the center for very interesting photographic interpretations. I arrived at this location before other “photo-walkers” arrived, so I briefly had the place to myself. I tried a few things with this subject, ranging from some very tight shots that don’t include the whole island to some that used very short focal lengths to reduce its apparent size and to then set it in a much larger surrounding landscape. This is probably the most straightforward composition of the bunch. Since the focus of this day was to be “long exposure” photography, I was playing around with that idea a bit, and this shot is indeed a rather long exposure.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Cottonwood Trees Detail, Autumn

January 3, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Close up view of golden autumn cottonwood leaves, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

One of the main reasons we visited this particular canyon at this particular time of year and on this exact day was… fall color from cottonwood trees and a few other contributors. This small group was growing almost directly against the cliff walls alongside the river, and when I was there the cliffs shaded the trees and provided softer, diffused light.

While many of my cottonwood photographs set the trees in their surroundings a bit more clearly, in this one I simply wanted to show the colors and patterns and textures of the trees themselves, so I chose to shoot in tight and exclude anything that was not “tree.” These trees really are this colorful, especially in this light. This presented me with a bit of a challenge while working on the photograph in post. When shooting in the shade, as I like to do with such subjects, the light is often quite blue, since the scene is largely lit by that giant blue light box that we often refer to as “the sky.” Most people (other than photographers) would not notice the blue-ness of the scene while standing there, but it becomes quite apparent when looking at the photograph. In order to make the color balance conform to what we think we see when on the scene, I often choose to warm up the color balance of all or part of the photograph. For example, I might move the objectively blue tones of background rocks more toward gray, if the rocks were that color. But here, if I went to the “objectively gray” point, the color of the trees shifts to be warm beyond belief, so here I left the overall balance a bit on the blue side.

(Note: This photograph was originally posted with the wrong title. The error has now been corrected.)

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspens and Granite, Autumn

January 2, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Aspen trees with golden autumn leaves grow among boulders on a rocky eastern Sierra Nevada slope

Before my single day of eastern Sierra Nevada aspen photography this season, I had been concerned about the quality and timing of the color – and reports by some other photographers who visited just before I was there were not encouraging. Reports mentioned trees that had turned earlier than usual (true) and trees that turned without producing special color and so forth. Compounding my concerns just a bit was the fact that my schedule required me to be there a bit earlier than the time I would typically regard as being prime for aspen color. But I’d rather shoot one day of less-than-stupendous aspen color than miss the entire show, so up into the eastern Sierra above Bishop, California we drove.

I was pleased to find that there was actually a lot of great color. Some of the usual “hot spots” that people seem to flock to were perhaps not as amazing as they can be, but after photographing the aspens for some years I have found some odd little personal places where I could find good color – and in a few places color that was downright excellent. I photographed these trees rather late in the day, perhaps after many people who prefer to photograph aspens in the sun had already left. I intentionally sought out an area that I knew would be in shade since I often prefer the muted and softer light this brings. Here the trees are not quite so thick since they grow on very difficult and rocky slopes. But what they lacked in density they made up for in color!

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: tree

Rat Rock Island, Sky

Aspens and Granite, Autumn

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