Tag Archives: website

News, Publications, Sierra Nevada Fall Color, Site News

I’m A Contributor To B&H “Pro Tips” Article On Fall Color

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Thank you to B&H Photo for including me in their new article on photographing fall color: Photo Tips and Favorite Gear for Successful Fall Foliage Pictures.

Autumn Color Transition
Brush and aspens undergoing the autumn color transition in the eastern Sierra Nevada

Excerpt:

“California-based G. Dan Mitchell notes that the color season can last months in California’s Eastern Sierra, given the large variations in elevation, precipitation, range of north/south latitude, and other factors. He explains, “When color is absent in one location, it may be great not far away. In the Eastern Sierra, this often means going to a higher or lower elevation. While aspens can start changing color at higher elevations in the second half of September, some trees at lower elevations may be colorful a full month later.”

“Author of the 2015 book, California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra, Mitchell notes that the Sierra offers a range of fall foliage opportunities far greater than many people realize.”

(About the “color season can last months…” comment. I can often find the first hints of coming autumn color early in September, and even in late August sometimes. I can still find low elevation color in the last half of October.)

Also included in the article – G Dan Mitchell, Bryan Carnathan, Moose Peterson, Dan Bailey, Matt Payne, and Chad DiBlasio

Enjoy!

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.

Morning Musings, Site News

What’s With the Daily Photographs? (Morning Musings 9/28/14)

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Mo's Cloud
Mo’s Cloud. Sierra wave cloud over the Long Valley California. May 28, 2005. © 2008 Copyright G Dan Mitchell — all rights reserved. (posted on my blog in July 2005)

Owens Valley near Mammoth, California. May 28, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved..

It occurs to me that many people are probably aware that I post a new photograph every day — but that few know how long I’ve been doing this nor my reasons for this seemingly obsessive task. Today I’m sharing a bit of the back story.

I’ve been building and operating websites since about 1995.  I’ll skip over a bunch of other interesting (to me) steps in the previous millennium and my first adventures with weblogs (now known as “blogs”) in the 1990s — though this could be a story for another day. Early on I created a blog about backpacking and other outdoor subjects called “Dan’s Outside,” and it gradually came to hold more and more photographs. At some point — likely around the time I acquired my first DSLR in the early 2000s — the photographs began to be the primary focus, and in 2005 I created a photography blog. The photograph at the top of this post was one of the earliest I shared, back in July of 2005.

Although I have not kept careful records, it looks like the daily photograph posts probably began to appear about a month later in August 2005, and they have continued mostly without a break since that time. That’s a lot of photographs! I haven’t actually counted, but it must be getting close to 3000 or more.

It would be reasonable to ask why I have done this. Continue reading What’s With the Daily Photographs? (Morning Musings 9/28/14) →

Commentary, Site News

New Comments Features Added

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I have added a feature to the comment pages on the site that should allow you to receive email notifications of follow-up posts in comment threads. (Site members can leave comments or ask questions by clicking the comment link on any post at this site.)

On a related note, I’ve added a list of most recent thread comments to the sidebar, and the active discussions link at the top of the page provides a more complete list of topics and comment threads.

Commentary

Tough Times for Photo Sites and Photographers Who Use Them

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Jim M. Goldstein posted an article at his blog yesterday that deals with recent changes at Photoshelter and Digital Railroad, two sites that have provided galleries, archival storage, and sales/licensing resources for many photographers. Photoshelter (which I’ve checked out and which seems to have a lot of interesting resources to offer) recently changed their service, eliminate an important element of what they originally offered to photographers. Digital Railroad suddenly announced its shutdown with almost no notice earlier this week, leaving many photographers in the lurch. In both cases, it appears that these services ran into funding problems that interfered with their business plans. Follow the link back to Jim’s article to read more background on this.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently as well. Being somewhat internet-savvy, I have worked with web hosting companies and more or less operated my own server applications, including the software that supports this blog/web site and other software that supports my gallery. This has not been without its problems. Ignoring for the moment the fact that hosting companies can also fail (keep good backups! of everything!), I ran into a serious customer support issue with my previous hosting company and had to move my entire web presence to another host (which seems to be doing a fine job, by the way) on very short notice. Although it is probably a story for another time, I’ll acknowledge that my choice to manage my own web presence cost me a ton of time during the past month, and has left me with some problems at this site that are still unresolved. (Notably a number of photos are now missing and, in some cases, stories are now linked to the wrong photographs.)

During this little web debacle that I’ve dealt with, I almost came to a decision to host my photographs at one of these commercial photography sites. I looked at three: pbase, zenfolio, and Photoshelter. While a full review is beyond the scope of this post, I will say that all three have a lot of worthwhile features to offer, the pricing seems reasonable to me, and I came “that close” to moving my photographs to one of the three. While it still could happen, at this point I’m going to sit tight for a while and see what happens to this segment of the photography industry first.