Tag Archives: white

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Two Oaks, Morning Sun

May 7, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

The springtime morning sun shines through a pair of oak trees in the Calero Hills south of San Jose, California.

On the final day of April and for the first time this season, I found to go for a hike at my favorite local park, a place where I have walked just about every available trail (and invented a few routes of my own) and photographed for a number of years. The park would not seem like anything all that special by comparison to some of the other places I visit, but it is close and I’ve gotten to know it in a way that makes it more special. The place is called the Calero County Park, part of the Santa Clara County Parks system.

The entrance to the park is in a broad valley that is largely occupied by stables. (Or, used to be – it looks like the stables must have closed since last season.) Rising from this valley are the typical grass-covered hills of central and northern California, with oaks and other trees scattered around and, in places, thicker trees and brush. At this time of year, the hills turn what I call “impossibly green” – and if you have seen them on a late-winter or early spring morning you know what I mean.

I started this hike a bit after dawn, so the golden hour light was more or less gone. I had a general idea of photographing some wildflowers (which didn’t happen – it was too windy) and some oak trees that grow alone or in small groups on the grass-covered hills. I passed a small lake – where a single egret often hangs out, but not on this morning – and topped a rise and descended into a small valley from which I have made quite a few photographs of oaks. It didn’t look too promising at first, but at the far end of this area I noticed that a pair of trees were still obscuring the sun and that I might be able to shoot straight into the sun with the trees blocking its disk, and get a photograph including the tree shadows on the hillside grasses.

This turned out to be another of those all-too-common ephemeral photographs in that the sun was starting to rise above the top branches of the tree and would soon be “out in the open,” making it much too bright for what I had in mind. So I worked quickly to set up tripod and camera and select a lens, then frame a composition, focus, and make a series of exposures that might be needed to deal with the huge dynamic range between direct sun and backlit tree trunks. By the time I had everything set up and was ready to shoot the sun had already risen above the upper branches, so I ended up looking for a slightly better shadow and putting the tripod down very low – and this gave me must enough time to make the series of exposures I figured I would need.

In the end, I got lucky. One single shot somehow managed to not blow the sun out too badly yet hold enough detail in the grass that a bit of work in post could bring it back. With all of the potential for lens flare – which I had to some extent in every shot – this one only had two small bits of it, and they were easily dealt with.

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

Ice, Water, Reflected Clouds

March 25, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Clouds in blue sky are reflected in the surface of Gaylor Lake next to melting winter ice.

This photograph is very similar to another I made on this late June evening in 2010 when a small group of us hiked over a ridge near Tioga Pass to find a snow covered valley and this lake that was still almost completely covered with ice. The deep blue water near the edge of the melting ice along the shoreline reflected evening clouds passing overhead, and there were quite a few possible compositions combining the clouds, blue sky, curving edge of the ice and the interesting formations where the ice surface was melting. I made quite a few photographs – some up close like this one and others taking in the larger landscape. As I was recently reviewing raw files from 2010, I ended up spending quite a bit of time with this set of images!

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Email
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: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Silhouettes, Flock of White Faced Ibises

March 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

A flock of white-faced ibises is silhouetted against evening blue sky and clouds above the Merced National Wildlife Refuge.

On this winter evening I visited, for the first time, the Merced National Wildlife Reserve on a detour I took while returning home from a few days photographing in Death Valley. This winter I have (finally!) started to become aware of the amazing annual influx of migratory birds in California’s Central Valley and I managed to get out there a couple of times to view and photograph the magnificent flocks of birds. Being new at this, I have been working at figuring out just how to photograph this subject, and I’ve come up with a few approaches that seem to work, though I have a lot to learn. In this case, I had figured out that if I just picked a spot and waited that eventually flocks would fly over my position, and that I would have a chance of photographing them against the evening sky and clouds. Being almost completely ignorant when it comes to identifying these birds – but no less impressed with them because of this – I had virtually no idea what I was photographing in the moment when I tracked the birds and made the exposures. In fact, it wasn’t until later that I noticed the wonderful curved bills of these birds and then found out from my friend Tom Clifton (who does know how to identify these critters) what they were.

As the birds approach I work to synchronize my camera motion with the speed and direction of their flight. I try to keep them in the frame, and preferably in the frame in a way that might create an interesting composition. And while I do that I try to keep some attention on the background against which they fly and some small remaining bit of my attention on the technical matter of keeping at least one of them under an autofocus point in the camera’s viewfinder. As a flock approaches, things seem to start out fairly slowly and it may seem like the birds are taking a long time to arrive. But as they get closer – especially when shooting with a 400mm focal length and double-especially when they are as close as this flock – the action speeds up, and as they pass overhead it is all I can do to keep them centered in the viewfinder as I let the camera’s burst mode do its job at the right moment.

There are things about the experience that the camera cannot capture. The cold and damp of a Central Valley winter evening might be evoked by the right sort of landscape photograph, but not by a photograph like this one – yet this is an integral part of the experience. Even more than that, the sound of these birds, alone or in huge groups, sticks in my mind as much or more than the visual image. If you have been there and heard it, perhaps a photograph may cause you to recall it.

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

Meltwater, Ice, and Cloud Reflections

March 22, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

Pools of water between sections of melting ice reflect evening clouds above Gaylor Lake, Yosemite National Park.

I continue to mine the vein of photographs from this early summer afternoon and evening visit to a lake not far from the Sierra crest at Tioga pass. In my defense I’ll point out that the conditions were variable and that I shot this subject in a number of different ways – close up views of ice and water, images that focus on the clouds, some that take in the more distant landscape of the surrounding ridges and peaks, others that focus on just the patterns of water and ice, and all shot as the light transitioned toward evening and was occasionally interrupted by clouds.

It is very unusual for me to get to visit a large lake with quite this combination of conditions. Sometimes in the early season I might encounter a lake that is still covered with ice, and later I often pass by lakes that are mostly clear but have snow banks and ice coming down to the shoreline. But in this case the lake was still covered completely in ice, but the ice was melting and creating pools of blue water on top of the remaining ice, and this water reflected the sky and passing clouds. I think the first things that might catch your attention in this photograph are the white areas of ice and the blue areas in between. But if you look a bit closer you see that the blue areas are anything but uniform. The shades of blue vary tremendously, sometimes approaching black in the shadows along the edges of the ice, spanning a range of shades in the open water, and then heading towards white in areas that reflect the clouds floating above the lake.

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