Tag Archives: valley

Early Evening, Florence

Image August 31, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early evening view of Florence, Italy from the Piazzale Michangelo.

This might be one of the best-known viewpoints in Florence, the Piazzale Michangelo. From this high terrace you look down and across the Arno River toward the old central city and beyond. If you know about the city you probably recognize at least a couple of landmarks in the photograph.

This photograph and the evening on which I made it might be a good reminder that the advice you sometimes hear about staying away from the most famous places isn’t always valid. I deal with this a lot in my landscape photography – I often love to go to somewhat anonymous, out-of-the way places, but I think the first-time visitors are often best off by starting with the well-known places. Knowing that this spot is so famous and seeing so many people heading that way, I might have decided not to join the throngs… but it turned out that the evening was beautiful and the throng was a big part of the fun!

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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Conservation/Environment, Ideas, Locations, News, Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Southern California, Thinking Aloud

Death Valley on My Mind

Image August 20, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Wash and Alluvial Fan — Morning light on a giant alluvial fan at the base of a desert mountain wash.

Morning light on a gigantic alluvial fan at the base of desert mountains, Death Valley National Park.

This morning I am waking up in a place that is almost literally on the other side of the world from my “home country” of California. As I look out the window from a home in Kosovo toward high mountains at the start the day I am thinking about the storm impacting my state today, and the deserts regions such as Death Valley are especially on my mind as I read reports of tropical storm Hilary.

Our natural impression of places like Death Valley National Park (the part of California’s desert terrain that I know best) is of dryness, heat, aridity… of places where little grows and where challenges human visitors. It isn’t quite that simple, but there is truth to this. Our biggest concerns in such places are often the heat and the scarcity of water.

But I have long been impressed by the fact that there are few locations where the impact of water is more clearly visible than in the desert, especially in the rugged terrain of places like Death Valley. The valley was once a lake. Remnant water from that lake still appears and flows there. The tremendous mountains on either side of the valley were eroded and formed by water, and monumental alluvial fans flow out of side canyons everywhere. Deep watercourses cut through rock, and a close look at stones reveals that they were moved by water.

Even when we recognize the landscape-forming power of water, we still think of the landscape as now being static — formed by forces that worked in the past but now have left a stable geography. A few rocks fall, occasionally a wash overflows and takes out a small section of a road, a playa may fill temporarily with water… but soon everything is back to “normal” as it was.

But this morning it sounds like we may experience much more profound changes as Hilary sweeps though, the sort that occur at intervals measured centuries. Those of us who love this landscape may find our access cut off and that much changes after this storm. I’m both excited by and fearful of these effects — but in any case this is a powerful reminder of the scale of the forces at work in these places we love.

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

Yosemite Forest and Cliffs

Image July 8, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Forest trees in afternoon sun with Yosemite Valley cliffs in the background.

Another recently-shared photograph included three trees, the base of El Capitan, and the lower reaches of the creek that produces Horsetail Fall. In that post I mentioned that the camera position was a fruitful one, and that I had made several photographs from nearly the same spot on this visit to Yosemite. You would need guess from the very different subject, but this photograph comes from the same spot. I’m sure that I did not move the camera more than a few yards between the two photographs, though I did swing it around by about 180 degrees.

This row of trees, conifers mixed with deciduous trees at this elevation, stood at the edge of a partially flooded meadow along the Merced River. Places like this allow longer view that what we typically see within the forest, and from here the view included some of the monumental cliffs of surrounding the valley. In this rendition I cropped tightly around the trees to bring the focus on them.

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

Flooded Forest

Image July 7, 2023 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A section of Yosemite Valley forest flooded by spring snow runoff.

There is often some degree of flooding in the Sierra during snow-melt season, and hiking can involve jumping streams, detouring around seasonal ponds, and occasional walking through some pretty muddy terrain. But this year is an extremely case. When I visited Yosemite Valley in late May there was flooding all over — trails that disappeared under water, meadows that had turned into lakes, and water flowing everywhere.

This particular spot is typically a sort of open forest with some grassy areas interspersed with the trees. But this time it looked more like a swamp, with water covering the perimeter trail and many trees standing in this temporary lake. The upside? Quite a few, including the beautiful reflections of the trees. Downsides? Mosquitos!

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: valley

Early Evening, Florence

Death Valley on My Mind

Yosemite Forest and Cliffs

Flooded Forest

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