Tag Archives: usa

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: San Francisco

Bay Reflections, Morning

Image January 1, 2021 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Bronze morning light reflects on the surface of San Francisco Bay and silhouettes Alcatraz and Treasure Islands.

Happy New Year! Let’s start 2021 with a sunrise. 2020 was a year we all want to put behind us as soon as possible — to move on as a country, to get through the worst of this pandemic and see vaccines take effect, to travel again, to see friends and relatives in person, to eat out and go to concerts and, all in all, perhaps find a bit of normalcy once again. So, perhaps the best wish is: Happier New Year!

The photograph is of San Francisco Bay, photographed not long after sunrise on a very early spring morning a few years ago. The conditions were a bit unusual — prevalent thin fog rather than the more typical strands of the stuff. I photographed directly toward the rising sun, capturing the metallic colors and textures of the Bay waters along with Alcatraz Island, Treasure Island, and the far shores of the East Bay.

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: Birds, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Sandhill Cranes and Tree, Tule Fog

Image December 31, 2020 G Dan Mitchell 6 Comments

Sometimes the way that photographs come into existence seems strange. We put a lot of effort into doing all the things that increase the chances of success — practice, learn technique, develop our ability to see, take care to have the appropriate equipment, go to the locations where photographs are possible, time things correctly, and more. All of these are efforts, I think, to diminish the role of chance. Or, perhaps giving ourselves a bit more credit, steps that increase the odds that we’ll be able to take advantage of good fortune when it comes to us.

The series of recent photographs of sandhill cranes in fog is an example of this dynamic. They certainly involved all of those controllable factors that I listed in the previous paragraph. But I can’t help but acknowledge what it means to create a series of photographs from, literally, not more than a few minutes (perhaps a half hour?) in one spot on one particular morning. Aside from the fact that I knew it was possible that I’d find a scene like this, it was not exactly predictable. The weather could easily have been different, the birds could have been elsewhere, I might have chosen a different day to be there. Yet, on this morning it came together and this series of photographs was the result.

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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

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.

Photographs: Birds, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Sandhill Cranes, Tule Fog

Image December 29, 2020 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Unlike most winter drivers in California, I was thrilled when I ran into serious fog about an hour before arriving at my intended photography location. I chose this day to visit the Great Central Valley specifically because I hoped to photograph in such fog. As I continued to drive, dropping down into the valley from surrounding hills, the fog only got thicker. By the time I arrived at my destination is was so thick that the roadway was. barely visible in the pre-dawn darkness. I turned off the main road and spent some time looking for birds, finally finding a flock of cranes standing in a shallow pond.

To read about nature photography and photographers, you might occasionally get the mistaken idea that it involves non-stop action and compelling scenes. You would be wrong. Those tend to the exceptions, and they are often separated by long periods of stillness and quiet. I don’t regard that as a problem and, in fact, this is part of the appeal of these places. The fog amplifies this effect, muting sounds and restricting visibility to a small radius. I stopped and slowly and patiently watched these birds, barely visible at times in the fog, making occasional photographs as they assembled themselves in interesting compositions.

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

Tower, Night Sky

Image December 28, 2020 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A tower against night sky at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

This is not the first nor the only photograph I’ve made of this structure. It comes from the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard in the San Francisco Bay Area, the place where I did my first serious night photography almost two decades ago. (It happened on more or less a lark when I saw an announcement of a free event, showed up, and became hooked.) This structure is one half of a pair of gigantic overhead tracks that I believe originally supported some sort of lift mechanism that moved heavy mechanical systems (probably engines) to ships that were under construction. The buildings were originally various shops connected to the shipbuilding work, though today, years after the facility was decommissioned, many of them have been taken over for other purposes.

The relationship between night photographs and objective reality is a complex thing. I think of it as revealing “what the camera sees” more than as capturing what we see at night. In truth, in places like this and in lightning like this… we can’t really see much at all. But by extending the exposure times we can make images out of what is largely unseen. (A close examination of this photograph will reveal star trails made as the earth rotated beneath the night sky over the course of a several minute exposure.) In the end, many decisions about such images — luminosity, color, and more — must be subjective, since there really is no objective reality that corresponds to what the camera sees.