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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Reflections, Rocky Shoreline

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Reflections, Rocky Shoreline
Huge rocky slabs meet the shorline of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake

Reflections, Rocky Shoreline. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Huge rocky slabs meet the shorline of a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake.

A group of us recently spent a week camped at 11,000′ in a landscape of water, glaciated rocks, meadows, and high peaks. AS the week went on we gradually pushed out the boundaries of our photographic explorations. My first view of this formation was on my initial scouting trip to this lake — I did not photograph it on that visit, but I made a mental note to return when the light would be more ideal. In this case, “ideal” meant “not in full sun,” so my plan was to come back in the early morning and evening hours. Early morning turned out to be best since the air was still at that hour, leaving the water still enough to produce coherent reflections.

I returned a few mornings later. Demonstrating once again the importance of what I might term “attentive serendipity” in photography, even though I got distracted and arrived at the lake later than planned, the timing turned out to be nearly perfect. I had a few minutes to photograph the larger landscape in the pre-sunlight “quiet light” before moving on to photograph this still-shaded scene. And once I finished here, the sunlight cooperated by arriving at a nearby rocky peninsula and both backlighting a tree and turning the water a lovely deep blue color.

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 and Amazon.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Ridge, Last Light

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Ridge, Last Light
The last evening light strikes the top of a Sierra crest ridge

Ridge, Last Light. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last evening light strikes the top of a Sierra crest ridge.

As a photographer of landscapes I like to think of myself as being something of a connoisseur of sunsets. Hey, I’ve seen a few of them! There is not denying that it is a special time of the day, just like dawn, when the landscape undergoes a rapid and often striking transformation, made more notable against the backdrop of daytime light that changes very slowly. As the day comes to an end the changes accelerate — shadows lengthen, the sun approaches the horizon or other blockage, the color of the light warms, and distant clouds and other features begin to affect the local scene. Quickly the light disappears, leaving some alpenglow if you are lucky, and then the transition slows again as darkness falls.

Over several evenings it became obvious that this ridge above our camp was the last one to get the sunlight. Since we were camped to the east of the Sierra Nevada crest, there was little full-on sunset light here. However, given the curved shape of the upper canyon and the high peaks on the crest, there were a few spots like this one that were open to the light coming from far to the west. On this evening some clouds assembled above the ridge, creating a more dramatic backdrop.

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 and Amazon.

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Glaciated Terrain

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Glaciated Terrain
A Sierra Nevada scene including glaciated slabs, a shallow lake, and old moraines

Glaciated Terrain. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A Sierra Nevada scene including glaciated slabs, a shallow lake, and old moraines.

There are quite a few “terrains” in the Sierra Nevada, ranging from foothills oak grasslands through the mid-elevation forest, and on up to the rocky alpine heights. Off all of them, I think my favorite is that found just below the treelike, where granite slabs are frequently interspersed with small trees and meadows, where you are rarely very far from water, and where evidence of the glacial heritage of the range are everywhere. There is virtually no element of this scene that doesn’t owe something to those glaciers — the smoothly rounded slabs of foreground granite, the lake lying in a scooped-out hollow where glaciers converged, the moraines (at least two of which appear in the photograph), and even the line between the tops of the glaciers and the more jagged formations that remained above their reach.

This photograph is also about light, and a more subtle form of it. I composed the scene to exclude as much of the direct morning sun as possible, but yet to take advantage of its presence nearby. One of the favorite forms of light among photographers is that which is reflected into the scene from nearby objects in bright light. Here much of the warmer colored light is of that sort, reflected into the scene from nearby slopes that were already in the direct morning sun. This light fills shadows and can add soft color to the cold tones in the shadows.

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 and Amazon.

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

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

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Peninsula, Lake, Morning Light

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Peninsula, Lake, Morning Light
Morning light on a rocky peninsula, reflected in the deep green waters of an alpine lake

Peninsula, Lake, Morning Light. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on a rocky peninsula, reflected in the deep green waters of an alpine lake.

My morning visit to this lake above our basecamp was fortuitously timed. I’d love to take credit for great planning, but I must admit that luck played a big role. I had a plan — it involved heading up that way quite early and then taking the time to ascend a low ridge and walk to the far side of the lake. But none of that happened. While I did get a reasonably early start, I was soon distracted by other subjects along the route to the lake, and I ultimately arrived there later than I had planned. However, my inability to stick to my schedule played to my advantage.

I arrived at the lake’s outlet, a long and narrow channel of still water, to find that the “quiet light” (thanks, Keith Walklet) was still there, so I paused to photograph that scene in soft shadows. Soon I decided to move on and head up and over that low ridge… but I immediately saw another scene that I had to photograph, some lichen-covered rocks along the shoreline. Finishing with this distraction, I now realized that I really had to get moving and climb that ridge. But by now the sunlight was on that ridge, and its reflection was casting lovely soft light back on a rocky peninsula and the boulder-strewn shoreline. So — again! — I stopped to make photographs of this scene. But this one took longer, as the light continued to develop and increase, until sunlight began to illuminate the water itself, building abstractions of light and color and reflections in front of the peninsula. (In the end I never did cross that ridge or go to the other side of the lake!)

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 and Amazon.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

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

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