Tag Archives: trees

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

Aspens, High Desert Valley

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Aspens, High Desert Valley
Autumn aspen trees line a creek through a high desert canyon, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

Aspens, High Desert Valley. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Autumn aspen trees line a creek through a high desert canyon, Eastern Sierra Nevada.

Heading across the Sierra early in the third week of October, I wasn’t certain what kind of aspen color I would encounter. There’s always some color at this point in the season, but in many years it has been diminished by wind and passing early weather fronts. But it seemed that these influences were muted this year, and as I approached Sonora Pass I was encouraged by seeing much more color than I expected. I turned south after crossing the pass I headed south where the forests of the Eastern Sierra begins to meet the high desert sage country. As I passed this small valley — where I had not really paid attention to the color potential in the past — I caught a flash of bright color below. I quickly turned around and backtracked to locate a better camera position.

Getting just the right conditions for these trees that grow along shallow canyons like this one is tricky, especially on the eastern slopes of the Sierra. Typical daytime light is often quite harsh, though that diminishes a bit with autumn’s lowering sun angles. But this time I got lucky, and broken clouds created patterns of light and shadow on the sage-covered hills. I set up and waited for the light to show up in the right places, and eventually it lit up the trees in the Vally and produced alternating light and dark patterns in the hills and mountains beyond.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Eastern Sierra Aspens

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Eastern Sierra Aspens
Late-season Eastern-Sierra aspens in green, yellow, and orange.

Eastern Sierra Aspens. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Late-season Eastern-Sierra aspens in green, yellow, and orange

With this post I interrupt the recent stream of New England fall color photographs to bring you fall color from California’s Eastern Sierra. Our productive trip to photograph the beautiful fall color in (mostly) New Hampshire cut into the time I would usually spend in the Sierra during the aspen color season, but I wasn’t about to miss it entirely. So I managed a four-day trip to the “East Side” last week, visiting several promising aspen color locations. As a result, I’ll eventually have a bit more to say about two subjects: a comparison between the East and West Coast experiences, and the prospects of finding Sierra color after the middle of October.

As I post this year’s Sierra aspen photographs, you’ll probably notice that I made many of them in soft light: near dawn or dusk, in the shadow of nearby mountains, or under some degree of cloudiness. Despite my love of backlit trees, this is my favorite kind o light for photographing the fall colors. To me the colors seem richer, and I can maintain more shadow detail than I typically get in the harsher direct sunlight. I made this photograph late in the day on the east side of the range, shortly after the sun had dropped behind the Sierra crest.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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

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Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

Autumn Forest and Creek

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Autumn Forest and Creek
A creek flows beneath autumn trees in the White Mountains of New Hampshire

Autumn Forest and Creek. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

A creek flows beneath autumn trees in the White Mountains of New Hampshire

This is a photograph of another branch of the creek that was featured in a recent photograph. The creek in the previous photograph flowed under a bridge to join the creek seen here. Both flowed down gentle rocky sloped though a quiet hardwood forest that was perhaps just past the prime color. On a day when crowds were visiting the more famous sites in this mountain range, it was pleasant to stop here in the still quiet for a while.

People from the Northeast who have me advice on this trip recommended several thing. Some had to do with timing, some with the typical transitions of the color. Others were about locations — and as a first-time visitor to this area I needed that advice. In addition to pointing out some of the must-see locations, almost everyone also said to get off the main roads and poke around some of the backroads, especially the smaller gravel routes. This was one of those, a road that we followed on a whim — and we ended up off the beaten path in places that are not as frequently visited.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Twitter | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

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

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: New England

Peak New England Color

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Peak New England Color
“Peak New England Color” — A White Moutains forest of almost-exclusively hardwood trees at the peak of fall color.

This photograph, if nothing else, illustrates some aspects of how New England fall color is different from what I usually photograph in California, particularly in the Sierra Nevada. Out here the colors tend to be relatively uniform, usually yellow to brown, broken by occasional examples of other colors. For example, the great majority of our aspens turn yellow/gold, which is why the occasional red and orange exceptions attract so much attention. And the Sierra trees are far less likely to appear in huge, mountain-covering stands — they more typically line the bottom of a valley, run upslope along a gully or other feature, and are surrounded by green conifers.

So what differences can we see here? First, the hardwoods vastly outnumber the sparse conifer trees. (I like the contrast the latter provide, however.) The hardwood forest stretches for great distances — that area of the photograph is quite large but it is only a small portion of the fall-colored trees I could see here. The tree color is also much more diverse, here including every shade from green through orange and red.

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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

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