Tag Archives: trees

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

Pond and Autumn Aspens, Evening

October 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A grove of autumn color aspens reflected in an eastern Sierra Nevada pond

I saved my visit to this place for the final evening of the final day of this year’s aspen hunt. Although I had passed by the mouth of this canyon four days earlier, while heading to another location near the start of my trip, I had only glanced in from the main highway — but I could tell, both from experience and from looking, that there would almost certainly be some good color here later on. Although the color change seemed to start on a rather early schedule this year, later on the pattern seemed to become closer to the norm. Color started high, and by the time I made this photograph a lot of the highest elevation color was going or gone. (Not all of it though — even amidst lots of bare trees up high, I still came across scattered high elevation groves full of color.)

As the color transition continues, it moves to successively lower elevations, and some of the most protected east-side canyons can hold color even longer. In the past this has often been a decent late season location for color, but I’ve also been there when the color came and went early, for reasons I could not decipher. So on this day when I actually entered the canyon for the first time this fall, I wondered if the colors that I could see along the stream where it emptied into larger valley below might be all there was… or if the color would continue up higher. It turned out that the colors did continue, and in outstanding form! The majority of the trees had fully or nearly fully changed color, with a few other trees at either end of the transition — some still all or mostly all green, and a few that had gone to bare trunks and branches. Far up the canyon there are flooded meadows, and I made this photograph at the highest of these ponds.

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

Green and Yellow Aspens

October 14, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A grove of green and yellow autumn aspen trees in the eastern Sierra Nevada

Since I just spent some days photographing autumn color in the Sierra Nevada, I’m going to interrupt the continuing series of early September Yosemite back-country photographs to share at least one of these recent autumn photographs. I began in the Tahoe area and this year I followed a path partly dictated by a fall color project that I’m working on, heading south through Hope Valley, then over Monitor Pass and continuing on the Bishop Creek area for a day of shooting before working my way back up into areas roughly around the intersection of routes 120 and 395 near Lee Vining.

As much as we all have “our places” to look for aspens, I was reminded again during this little jaunt that you can pretty much go anywhere in the Sierra or along its eastern slopes this time of year and quickly find tons of autumn color. I have a few favorites, indeed, and I understand that those just discovering the fall colors may want to go to “sure bet” places, but I’m having more and more fun just poking around and finding color in lots of odd little places. This location is very close to an area where many, many people were stopped to photograph some very spectacular color in a well-known place — but here, just a ways down the road, I was the only person shooting as cars whizzed past on their way to those other places.

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

Mt. Conness, Dusk

October 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dusk light falls across Mt. Conness and northern Yosemite wilderness

This ridge holds an astonishing range of photographic subjects, ranging from the smallest (tiny trees growing through cracks in the rock) through the intimate landscapes of trees and boulders and culminating in some grand vistas of distant ridges and peaks. For several days, even though there were other nearby subjects calling out to me, I returned repeatedly to this area, whose size cannot be more than a few acres.

I climbed up to photograph on this ridge one final time on our last night at this location. At first I went back to take care of some unfinished business — photographing subjects that I had seen but not shot on previous evenings, looking for a few in evening light that I had noticed at other times of the day, and working to perfect and distill images of certain subjects that I had photographed earlier. I finished most of that work as the sun set and the light began to go, and I started back across the ridge toward camp. As I crossed the ridge I caught a view of distant Mount Conness — named after the senator whose bill created Yosemite as a national park in the 1800s — in the glow of post-sunset dusk light that was still illuminating the foreground forest and granite.

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

Glacial Erratics, Cathedral Range

October 8, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Sunset light on glacial erratics, domes, and the Cathedral Range

The first time I ascended this system of granite slabs to its high point was in the morning, and my goal was to shoot the opposite direction from the scene shown here, so that I could capture the backlight on trees ascending from the ridge toward a higher valley to the east. While up here it became apparent that this spot had potential beyond just that of trees in morning light, and I made several more visits during out stay here.

On this evening I thought I would find out what late-day light possibilities might exist. My initial idea was to arrive soon enough to shoot down the slabs into an open forest of lodgepole pines that seemed like it might catch evening backlight in interesting ways. I arrived at a spot from which I thought such a shot was possible, but it seemed a bit too early for ideal light, and I continued on up the granite rib to a higher point. The atmosphere and light were a bit tricky. At this time of year it is very common to see a bit of wildfire smoke in the air, and that was the case on this evening. In addition, there were some high clouds far to the west and seemed likely to mute the last light. In fact, just as I initially set up this shot the light quickly faded, as if someone had turned down the dimmer switch on a lighting system! At first I was disappointed, but when I looked to the west to see the clouds that blocked the light I could see that there was a gap below the clouds through which the sun would likely shine once more before sunset. So I waited. Perhaps five or ten minutes later the light began to change silently (somehow it always seems a bit odd that only the light changes at those moments) and I managed to shoot through the transition from dark to full light and make one exposure when the light had come back on both the near features and the distant ridge.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: trees

Pond and Autumn Aspens, Evening

Green and Yellow Aspens

Mt. Conness, Dusk

Glacial Erratics, Cathedral Range

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