Tag Archives: wildlife

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

Elephant Seal Family

July 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Baby elephant seal and its mother, Piedras Blancas

I spent some time photographing at the elephant seal rookery at Piedras Blancas, California at the end of January, but I let the image files sit for a few months before going back and looking at them with fresh eyes. The rookery at Piedras Blancas is special for several reasons. Not that long ago the elephant seal popular was terribly depleted on the west coast, but they have made a tremendous come-back in recent years, and now the Piedras Blancas rookery is one of the places where these huge animals are easy to see. During the breeding/birthing season they haul out on this beach (and many others that are less accessible) that is right off of the Pacific Coast Highway, making it very easy to observe them.

At times the beach is literally covered with these creatures — the huge males, the smaller breeding females, and the newborn babies. The sound is amazing, and I doubt that I can offer any real description in words. You have to hear it. The big males make guttural sounds that seem almost mechanical. The babies howl and whine. Most of the time they lie almost still on the sand, but every so often something sets them off and pairs will engage in mutually threatening behavior, especially some of the males who are apparently trying to establish dominance. The little scene in the photograph belies all of that action, as an elephant seal pup rests next to its mother’s curving body.

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

Wetlands Fog, Dawn

July 9, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Reflected in a shallow pond, the winter sun rises through morning fog over San Joaquin Valley wetlands

I’m going to take a break from the series of black and white seascapes that I have posted recently and which will soon continue, and today I’m posting a more colorful photograph from this past winter. The scene is at sunrise in the San Joaquin Valley of California back on a mid-February day when we had traveled there to photograph migratory birds. At least that was my excuse. The truth is more complex — I do love photographing the geese, cranes, herons, egrets, pelicans and more, but I also love photographing the flat landscape of this valley, especially in the beautiful, misty atmosphere of winter.

We had arrived here before dawn in near darkness, and a thick ground fog was blocking the view. As the dawn came and lightened the sky above, as is often the case in the San Joaquin, we could see the high clouds through the fog, and the fog soon began to thin and reveal the sun rising through higher clouds to the east above the Sierra Nevada. I found a spot along the west edge of this marsh where I could photograph back across its reflecting surface and straight into the morning’s first light.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Winter Sky

July 4, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening winter sky above California’s San Joaquin Valley

From that hour between late afternoon and the sometimes-fiery colors of sunset, a winter sky over the San Joaquin Valley of California, photographed on New Years Day 2014. Every so often I see a sky and what to photograph it, separated from the landscape below, and forming its own sort vaporous cloudscape.

Photographs: Abstract, Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

July 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Motion blur abstraction of a winter scene with three birds landing

Near the end of the day, well along into the dusk hour, with light fading fast, I decided to take advantage of the poor light and “play” a bit with very slow shutter speeds and intentional camera motion. By moving the camera in various ways during the exposure I can control to some extent the angle, length, and linearity of the blur. In some cases it is enough to just track the birds — and give the less fuzzy image of the three central birds, I am pretty certain that is what I was doing here. In other cases I can basically ignore the motion of my subjects and simply think about how to move the camera to create patterns in the motion blur.

I’ve often felt that working for sharply focused, stopped motion images of birds is not the only way to depict whatever it is that attracts me to them. The camera lets us see birds in ways that we really cannot usually see them with our own eyes. When birds are in motion it is almost impossible — at least with many types of birds — to clearly see them. They move too fast and the motion of wings is essentially impossible to track visually. And when we do stop them with a fast shutter speed, while we get to see them with a kind of clarity that isn’t otherwise possible, we may also sacrifice that sense of constant motion. So I started playing with the idea of intentionally avoiding sharp focus, allowing camera motion to come into play and using slow shutter speeds to allow the birds to blur and to blur their surroundings as the camera moves. To me, this sometimes evokes more strongly the feeling of the fast motion that I observe among these birds, and creates a different sort of honest portrayal of them.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: wildlife

Elephant Seal Family

Wetlands Fog, Dawn

Winter Sky

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

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