Sunset Watchers, Griffith Observatory. Los Angeles, California. November 28, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Visitors to the Griffith Observatory watch the autumn sunset.

Before this trip to the Los Angeles area, where I’ve been many times over the years, I had never actually been to the iconic Griffith Observatory overlooking the LA basin. That should probably embarrass me at least a little bit as a near-native Californian — but, heck, I’ve been to Disneyland! ;-)

We were actually staying much further south, in the Mission Viejo area, but we decided to spend a day farther north in Los Angeles. We (well, OK, I) wanted to visit a particular photography museum, and we had a restaurant in mind for dinner. In the end, we found ourselves with a bit of extra time and someone picked the Observatory as a good place to spend it. I had not idea it was so popular, and when we got there we found huge crowds — perhaps because it was just about sunset, and there is hardly a better place to be at sunset than here. I made this photograph, shooting handheld in the evening light, and was fascinated by the dense crowd of people packed onto the terraces surrounding the building.

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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