Tag Archives: water

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature

Desert Sky, Negit Island

September 16, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Mono Lake and dark Negit Island beneath a vast and cloud-filled summer sky

Mono Lake still seems like a somewhat mysterious place to me. Although I’m familiar with parts of it, having gone by and to it for many years on Sierra trips and having photographed there many times, I find it hard to quite get my mind around it in the same way that I can with many other places. There are probably several factors that contribute to this. First, it is obviously an absolutely huge place. While I can see the far side of the lake and the mountains beyond, they are a great distance away, as I’ve realized when traveling just part way around it – so I have looked at much of it but I have not directly experienced that much of it close up. Second, we feel that we know the chief features of this lake very well – they are, I suppose, the lowering water level of this close-off basin lake, its tremendous size, the mineral-filled water, and the famous tufa formations. But a bit more time, even only that time that I’ve spent there that is mostly secondary to “Sierra time,” and it starts to be clear that these things are not the whole story.

Some years ago, when photographing the tufas around dawn, mostly when almost no one else was around, I began to catch on to the fact that things like the sounds of flocks of birds, the immense distances on land and – especially – in the huge sky, the wind, and the deep quiet of the place have more to do with its character than the tufas. Often when I stop there now I do not go to the tufas at all, instead perhaps expanding my knowledge of other areas of the lake and surrounding country. This photograph was made from above the lake, in a location where I could look slightly down on the water, which better shows its expanse, and on the dark shape of volcanic Negit Island. But I chose to include them primarily not for their own value but rather to anchor that vast sky with its building afternoon clouds.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Detail, Pearl District Building

August 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Detail of a section of a Pearl District building with painted walls and bricks, Portland, Oregon

I grabbed this photograph while walking through an area of what seems to me like it might be called the outer Pearl District. (True Portlandians could no doubt narrow it down more specifically.) This is a very pleasant area of more-or-less downtown Portland that seems to gentrifying – with some elements left from an older era and many things seeming to be updated and changed.

This building is on a street with a number of older buildings – with enough bricks to make this earthquake-country person just a bit nervous. Aside from that, a lot of the buildings seem familiar to someone from the San Francisco Bay Area. As we walked past, several things grabbed my attention for no particular reason: the combination of red/brown and shades of green, the horizontal pipe interrupting the rough and painted over surface of the brick foundation, and the somewhat geometric quality of the composition.

Photographs: Mono Lake Basin, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Mono Lake Sky

August 16, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon thunderstorms develop over the eastern Sierra Nevada and Mono Lake

I think that many people are initially drawn to Mono Lake by the famous and often photographed tufa tower formations, and I have certainly sought out and photographed that subject quite a few times. But the more I go there the less I’m interested primarily in the tufas, and the more I find myself drawn to and thinking about other things. These include the immense space and deep quite surrounding the lake, broken by the cries of birds, especially when you visit at the quietest time around dawn. I also am drawn to the sky above this lake – which is often, frankly, rather barren, but when filled with the right kind of clouds can almost be the subject itself.

But only almost, so in this photograph I decided to include a thin strip of the reflecting water of the lake along with the darker formation of Black Point and the hills rising beyond in order to anchor that sky to something solid. This was one of those afternoons when thunder storms were trying to develop, but couldn’t quite build sufficiently before sundown. But this still left some very spectacular clouds, especially where updrafts pushed their tops high into the light. I suppose that there are several reasons that I chose to make this a black and white photograph, but one very practical reason was that the lower reaches of the atmosphere were a bit brown from a nearby wildfire, and I could better adapt to that in monochrome.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Rocks, Surf, and Dusk Horizon

August 7, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A curving rock shelf extends into the “blue hour” Pacific Ocean surf and toward the fog-darkened horizon as night approaches.

A short, evening visit to the California coast above Santa Cruz began with photography in golden hour light in areas where the fog bank hung just offshore with moist air over the coast creating a gentle, misty atmosphere and soft light. We photographed a few subjects in this light – and looked at others that we did not stop to shoot – and continued north as the sun dropped toward the horizon, where the fog waited to envelop it. We stopped at a beach where large groups of pelicans were resting and then resuming their flight along the coast, and noted that there was still a bit of light in the sky and, oddly, below the bottom of the fog bank along the horizon. As this light died, we turned briefly north, and I soon saw this rocky bench extending into the ocean waves.

Following the evening golden hour there is a time that some call the blue hour – when the warmer colors of sunset drain from the sky and we are left with soft, blue light. It might have seemed odd to anyone watching me photograph this rocky feature, but instead of hurrying to shoot it before the light faded, I took my time – I wanted the light to fade, both for the mysterious blue coloration and because this would make it easier for me to use extended exposure times to allow the water to soften and blur a bit. When I began shooting it was only dark enough to get exposures of perhaps a second or two – at least without adding a neutral density filter – but as I waited, making an occasional photograph in the interim, the light began to move toward a near-night state, and I was able to get exposures of 15 seconds or longer… and that blue light that I was looking for.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: water

Desert Sky, Negit Island

Detail, Pearl District Building

Mono Lake Sky

Rocks, Surf, and Dusk Horizon

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