Tag Archives: willow

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

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

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Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage
Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage. Bishop Creek Drainage, California. October 11, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn foliage on a steep, rocky eastern Sierra Nevada slope

This is a bit of a complicated photograph, and I’ll try to make some sense out of it below. The back story is that I was in the eastern Sierra doing some fall color photography, and early on this Saturday morning I had gone to a fairly popular location for photography. It is a place that I’ve photographed many times, going all the way back to a few years ago just before the huge popularity of digital cameras began to bring sometimes-overwhelming numbers of photographers to the area. I was quite sure that there would be large groups there on this morning, including photography workshop participants lined up along the shoreline of the nearby lake, but I also knew that there would be plenty of other things for me to photograph without joining the crowd.

I began by making some photographs of small things — little vignettes of a few aspen leaves, some rocks and boulders, light shining through branches holding colorful leaves. As I did this I saw that the far side of the canyon was going to remain in shadow after the sun began to wash things out elsewhere, so I decided to use a long lens and photograph trees and rocks in that location from a distance. Most of the photographs feature more obvious subjects such as an individual grove of colorful trees, but in this one I decided to just go with the complexity of the scene, which includes broken rocks, brush, and a few small aspen trees.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Early Autumn Snow, Eastern Sierra

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Early Autumn Snow, Eastern Sierra
Early Autumn Snow, Eastern Sierra

Early Autumn Snow, Eastern Sierra. Along Highway 395, California. October 9, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An early autumn snow storm obscures the view of pines, aspens and other fall foliage in the eastern Sierra Nevada

This photograph, like a few others I have posted this fall, was made on an early October day when we drove across the Sierra from west to east during the first “real” snow of the season. Our goal was Bishop, California, since we planned to photograph autumn aspen color on the “east side” for a few days. Since the usual more direct route over Tioga Pass was closed due to snow, we ended up crossing all the way up close to Tahoe over Carson and then Monitor Passes to get to highway 395, which we then followed southwards along the east side of the Sierra.

The snow began before we reached Carson pass, and though it never fell very heavily, it more or less continued for the rest of the drive, only stopping shortly before we got to Bishop. This was quite a contrast to the weather we had been having, which had been up into the low 90s in our part of California only a few days earlier! Since we had the whole day to get to Bishop we made frequent stops and detours along the way, giving us lots of opportunities to photograph scenes that had a distinctly winter-like appearance. One place we paused was along a high point on highway 395 just north of Lee Vining, where huge groves of colorful aspen trees were just visible through the blowing snow. Turning slightly away from the aspen color, I chose to make a few isolated evergreen trees the focus of this photograph.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Arch in Morning Light

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Broken Bow Arch, Morning - Morning light on Broken Bow Arch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monumnet
Morning light on a backcountry arch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Arch in Morning Light. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah. October 25, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on a backcountry arch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

In a land of many arches… this is another one. :-) I’ve come to understand that natural arches and natural bridges, which still seem miraculous to me when I see them and think about how they form, turn out to be almost absurdly common features in the American Southwest. My first exposure was, not surprisingly, at Arches National Monument, where there are more of them than you might believe if you did not see them with your own eyes. They seem to come in all forms and sizes: impossibly slender and long, small and delicate, big and blocky, towering above the surrounding terrain, invisible unless you happen to look the right direction in the right light, short and stubby, and seemingly infinite additional variations.

Since my first acquaintance with the more famous specimens at Arches National Park, I have had the opportunity to see a few others in less accessible locations. This one required a long and convoluted hike through terrain that held its own attractions apart from the arch – in fact, I had almost forgotten about the arch when we reached it. The photograph is from a high point near the arch – on the opposite side from our approach – and from the shady side of the feature at this time of day. From many vantage points it stands a bit too much against the sky, which did not seem to me to be the most attractive background. From this spot it was possible to find a camera position where the sky was out of the frame, and this allows the shape and texture of the arch to be seen in the light reflected from nearby walls.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | 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: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Steelhead Lake, Morning

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Steelhead Lake, Morning - Morning light on shoreline trees at Shoreline Lake.
Morning light on shoreline trees at Shoreline Lake.

Steelhead Lake, Morning. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. September 15, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on shoreline trees at Shoreline Lake.

This photograph comes from my late-season three-day backpack trip up into McGee Canyon in the eastern Sierra. This has been a very unusual summer in various ways, so it was almost certainly also my only pack trip this season. (This is very unusual for me – I typically spend several weeks to as much as a month on the trail each summer.) I have visited the McGee Creek trailhead on a number of occasions, most often while searching for aspen color, but I had never hiked more than perhaps a quarter mile up the trail into the canyon. The three of us were rather lazy about planning. At various times leading up to the trip we had thought about heading up to the McGee Lake area, possibly crossing McGee Pass on the Sierra crest and various other ideas – but we hadn’t really settled on anything specific by the time we arrived at the trailhead.

More or less while loading up the packs, we decide that Steelhead Lake would be out likely objective. None of us had been there before, and I was pretty much completely unaware of the place or more than the general outline of the day’s hike. I had briefly looked at maps, but not in any detail. I understood that we would follow the main trail straight up the canyon and then follow its curve to the left as we climbed. I also knew that somewhere up there I would find a trail junction to Steelhead Lake and that it didn’t look like the like was very far beyond this junction. (Sometimes I like to intentionally avoid knowing too much about a place in advance, since this allows me to discover it on its own terms when I get there.) The first portion of the hike was much as I imagined, except that I was surprised to find that there were extensive aspen groves and that they were already changing colors. There was one bit of surprise when the junction to Steelhead Lake turned out to be further up the trail than expected. However, the biggest surprise – and not quite the happiest one – was that what looked like a short journey up this side trail to the lake turned out to be a very, very steep climb! In any case, the lake itself turned out to be a pretty little isolated place, being at more or less the end of a spur trail. It sits in a bowl that with steep slopes on two sides and, somewhat surprisingly for an “east side” location, while it gets decent evening light over the crest, it does not get very early morning light at all. I made this photograph shortly after that morning light had finally arrived and backlit some of the lakeside trees near out campsite.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | 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.