Tag Archives: twisted

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

Burned Forest, Twisting Branches

March 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Bare, twisted branches in burned forest, Yosemite National Park

For a number of years, Yosemite National Park has allowed naturally set fires to more or less burn themselves out under supervision, and management fires are set regularly in areas including Yosemite Valley. For many of us there is a natural negative response to this, at least initially, since we were brought up on a stead Smoky Bear diet of “fire is bad!” It turns out that not all fires are bad. In fact, the healthy forests depend on fire – to clear out underbrush and reduce the fuel load and even to prompt the renewal of plant life. Ironically, there is some thought that one reason for the very big and very destructive fires that have occurred more recently is that fires have been suppressed for so long that too much fuel has built up in the forest, allowing fires that might otherwise be “healthy” to become firestorms that destroy even mature trees.

The evidence of fire is found in many areas of the park, including Yosemite Valley. If you visit late in the season you might find a managed fire underway, closing off sections of the forest and spreading smoke. (While I worry about the health effects of the smoke, I have learned to use it photographically but finding ways to use the haze in my images.) For some time I have worked to find ways to photograph the burned areas. They can have a kind of stark beauty in the right light and when looked at in just the right ways. I had stopped in a more traditional meadow, full of dormant winter grasses and leafless winter trees, when I looked behind myself to see on of the managed burn areas, and these curving and twisting bare limbs against a background of scorched trunks.

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

Old Cottonwood Trees, Autumn

January 4, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Old cottonwood trees against autumn sky, Grand Staircase-Escalente National Monument

This is a photograph that I wish I had seen this way while I was there! On the scene, while wandering into a beautiful section of a big, deep canyon to photograph water, sandstone, and fall colors, I came across these trees (or this tree – they may grow from a common root system) and made the photograph in landscape orientation… and only realized while working on it in post that I really like it in portrait orientation, too. So, yes, this is cropped from a larger original photograph.

I don’t know how others will “see” this, but for me this version recalls a lot of older monochrome photographs of subjects like this from an earlier era – the era in which I first came to be fascinated by photography. Way “back in the day” when I first did photography, with the encouragement and help of my father, virtually all of the photographers whose work inspired me shot black and white. With that in mind, and with my early experience involving how to shoot, develop, and print black and white, I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that I still love monochrome. (A number of my personal favorites among my own work are black and white.) In this one I even applied the virtual equivalent of the classic filtering to alter the tonal balance and lighten clouds and foliage and somewhat darken the massive, twisting forms of tree trunks and branches.

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

Broken Branches

December 16, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The broken branches of a fallen tree on the ground in the back-country of Yosemite National Park.

These branches belong to what is left of a tree that fell in the area around our campsite in the north east section of the back-country of Yosemite National Park. On a couple of mornings during the time we were there doing photography, I began my morning by wandering a bit through this section of forest, meadow, and dried-up ponds, looking for whatever little miniature landscapes I might find.

Dried and broken branches of fallen and dead trees intrigue me, though they can make very difficult subjects to photograph. Light and color are tricky – too much light and it is difficult to get shadow detail without washing out the highlights; too little light and the subject can go flat and pick up blue tones. And sometimes the patterns are so complex and disorganized as to nearly defy my efforts to make any sort of compositional sense out of them.

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

Tree and Stained Granite

November 17, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small tree grows from a crack in red-stained granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

Back in mid-September of this year I joined a group of five other photographers for a bit more than a week of photography in the High Sierra back-country of Yosemite National Park, going out along the Tuolumne River and spending some significant time in two locations and having several days to photograph at each of them. The first few days were spent along the Tuolumne in a place where a short hike led to a beautiful bowl of smooth granite slabs interrupted by some trees and stained by seepage from a band of reddish rocks above. In some ways this might have seemed like a tricky spot to photograph since it is in the bottom of a canyon and the light is blocked to the east and somewhat blocked to the west. But I like the indirect light found in shaded areas after dawn and before sunset, so I went back to this area on at least three days to photograph in this diffused, soft light.

The rocks are part of a large area of granite slabs that this non-geologist assumes were carved and smoothed by glaciers traveling down from the peaks above the Tuolumne area. In this spot the formations include large areas of smooth and curved granite surfaces, areas that have been pock-marked by erosion and water, cracks of various sizes ranging from incipient to gigantic, and trees and other plants growing anywhere they can find footing: tiny cracks, larger cracks like this one, collections of sand and debris in low spots, and so on. I came back to this tree and some of its neighbors several times and came to think of it as the “bonsai tree.”

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: twisted

Burned Forest, Twisting Branches

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Old Cottonwood Trees, Autumn

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Broken Branches

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Tree and Stained Granite

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

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