Tag Archives: trip

Commentary

Death Valley Delayed

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Earlier this winter I had evolved a plan to visit Death Valley earlier in the year than I usually do – I was planning on going later this week. However, as the season as unfolded it has turned out to be a very wet one in DEVA NP. According to reports (including this one) many roads are closed or washed out, including those to some of the places I was planning to visit. While the wet conditions also bring some special and unusual opportunities (including landscapes with reflections in ponds), at this point I’m going to hold off and reschedule my visit for the end of March.

By that time there is a good chance that more of the closed areas will have reopened. I have a hunch that this might also end up being a special year for wildflowers – and if I’m lucky I might manage to be there at right about the best time.

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

House with Window, Purple Trim, and Plastic Tree

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House with Window, Purple Trim, and Plastic Tree
House with Window, Purple Trim, and Plastic Tree

House with Window, Purple Trim, and Plastic Tree. San Jose, California. January 30, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An old suburban home with barred window, purple trim, brick steps, and plastic Christmas Tree – San Jose, California.

I made this photograph on a late afternoon/early evening “photo walk” from my home. This is an interesting and perplexing building. It is a very unusual home, as you can see from the unusual room line and the shapes at the end of the rounded eaves. Someone perhaps once put a lot of thought and effort into creating such an unusual building – unlike most others in the area. But as the place has aged the result has not been wholly wonderful. The purple paint isn’t necessarily a bad thing – just a bit unusual – but it is quite worn. The tiny plastic Christmas tree to the right of the front door is a strange touch; it still has a very small string of lights attached. And things are a bit off-kilter. The room angles don’t quite match up and the grate over the window tilts to one side. Although this was originally a home, I can’t really tell for sure if it is still a home or if it has become some sort of office or business.

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News

Back from the Eastern Sierra

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Just back this Saturday evening (hey, looks like it is now Sunday morning) from a five-day trip to the eastern Sierra. This was a trip that almost didn’t happen, and actually did not happen according to the original plan. We originally planned a week-long pack trip into the upper Kern River basin, but those plans were scrapped at the last moment due to a variety of circumstances. Instead a group of three of us dialed back our plans and came up with a shorter trip to the lakes of Sabrina Basin. However, the night before I cracked a tooth! Fortunately, I have a cooperative dentist, and he saw me first thing in the morning on the day I was to leave. I’ll spare you all the dental details, but suffice it to say that he patched things up enough that I was on the road at 2:30 p.m. to rendezvous with my hiking partners at the Four Jeffrey campground that night at 9:00 p.m.

The next morning we headed up the trail out of Sabrina Lake and over the next four days we managed to visit a whole series of alpine lakes: Blue, Topsy Turvy, Sailor, Midnight, Moonlight, and a few others. We had some slightly challenging conditions when an unusual weather system passed over the northern Sierra, bringing rather high winds and colder than usual temperatures throughout the range. On the plus side, the cold seemed to suppress the mosquitoes – and we had a rare conjunction of peak wildflowers and few mosquitoes.

There are still some earlier photos in the queue, but photographs from this trip should start to show up here in the next week or so.

Commentary

A Couple Quick Updates

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PeterP wrote left a “comment” asking how I do black and white conversions. I replied with a brief overview of my approach to using the “Black and White” layer in CS4 and then working with multiple masked curves layers to fine tune the resulting image.

I returned yesterday from a four-day pack photography backpack trip into the Young Lakes area of the Yosemite back-country out of Tuolumne Meadows. I’m currently going through a few hundred RAW files and beginning to work on a few of them. Conditions in the Sierra this past week were “interesting” – meaning some pretty good sized thunderstorms every afternoon and lots of interesting light somewhat marred by occasional smoke floating up from a wildfire burning lower in the Tuolumne River drainage.