Tag Archives: year

2016 Favorite Photographs

The task of selecting a small set of annual favorites is both a joy and a chore. It is a joy to traverse the year in photographs, recalling the circumstances of the creation of each photograph. This years photographic opportunities ranged across a spectrum. Photograph of the natural world included work from the Sierra, Death Valley, the Pacific Coast, and migratory bird habitats in California and Oregon. Photography of the human world included night photography done on both coast of the United States plus extensive travel in the UK, Paris, Germany, Italy, and a few other spots.

I started with nearly 40 photographs — way too many for a favorites list. With the help of social media friends who viewed photographs, rated,  and commented on photographs, I cut the set to about half that number. After a final round of comment and critique, I (brutally, it feels) cut the set to only ten photographs, with half from the human world and half from the natural world.

The diversity of my photography poses a challenge. Continue reading 2016 Favorite Photographs

2014 Favorite Photographs

[Favorites collections from previous years: 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008]

Welcome to this collection of some of my favorite photographs from 2014.  I’ll get to the photos in a moment — yes, on this page! — but first a few stories, a shout out or two to fellow photographers and friends, and more…

This year I photographed a wide range of subjects from musicians to street photography to minimalist images to landscapes. It is always a challenge to select a few images from this variety of work, and invariably some photographs I love had to be left out. The group of photographs shown here was chosen because I like them, because they have been popular with others, and because they represent the diversity this year’s work. This year I think I can truthfully say that they range from the sublime to the ridiculous. (See if you can find the ridiculous one!)

Many wonderful places, subjects, and (especially) people were part of this year’s photography. Here is a partial accounting: The year began with photography of perhaps my favorite winter subject, the migratory birds and the often foggy landscape of California’s Central Valley — as always with friends David Hoffman, Charlotte Hoffman, Michael Frye, Claudia Welsh, and, of course, my wife Patricia Emerson Mitchell. Early in the year we traveled to Yosemite for a few days of shooting in conjunction with the opening of the annual Yosemite Renaissance exhibit, which again included some of my work — and in addition to the photography, it was great to see so many photographer/artist friends in the Valley. In the very early spring we had a good visit to Death Valley, one of my favorite and most frequent subjects — where we encountered snow and, for the first time in my life, I photographed wildflowers in a snowstorm! Among the summer highlights was a train trip across the US to spend a week photographing (and eating and much more) in New York City. Near the end of the summer I joined a group of good friends (Charlie Cramer, Keith Walklet, Mike Osborne, Scot Miller, Annette Bottaro-Walklet, Karl Kroeber and a supporting cast of mules and wranglers) for an extended back-country shoot in Yosemite. Fall took me back to the Sierra for nearly a week of aspen color chasing, and then I made my way back to Utah for fall color and visits to some beautiful out of the way places and ultimately to meet up with family. (Thanks to fellow photographers on that trip: David Hoffman, Guy Tal, Colleen Miniuk-Sperry, Michael Gordon, Charlie Cramer, Bruce Hucko — and to my cousin Barbara and her husband Russ and a few in-laws I met up with near the end of the trip in Zion.) My biggest photographic focus during the fall was the completion of my three-year project to photograph professional classical musicians — and I’m very grateful to the musicians, conductors, management, and staff of the San Jose Chamber Orchestra and Symphony Silicon Valley for their incredible cooperation.

A big “thank you!” to all of you who have followed my photographs here and on social media during the past year, and especially to fellow photographers (a few of whom appear in one of the photos!) that I’ve been fortunate to work with and count as friends. I’m grateful for your support! If this is your first visit to my site, consider bookmarking it, using the sidebar form to subscribe by email and/or…

Follow me on social media: Facebook | Google+ | Twitter  | Flickr | ello | Pinterest | 500px.

Wishing everyone Good Light in 2015!

G Dan Mitchell

(Click on any photograph below to switch to a larger scrolling view for best viewing. And I would love to hear what you think — which are your favorites in the group and so forth. Thanks!)


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.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | FacebookGoogle+ | 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.

2013 Favorite Photographs

“With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.” – Ansel Adams

I have compiled annual “favorites” collections for almost ten years. Each year I think this will just be an exercise in selecting photographs, and each year I rediscover that it is more than that – an opportunity to reflect on growth and new ways of looking at the world, a chance to think forward about what is yet to come, a time to recall a year of places and experiences and friendships.

It is a hard to distill a year’s work down to a few photographs, and I’m afraid that I can’t reduce the number to the extent that some can. This year I have – painfully! – gotten it down to 18 images, which is perhaps still too many. But it is 25% fewer than the 24 I shared last year! (Adams also said, “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” So feel free to regard up to a half dozen of these as being insignificant! ;-)

Many things affected my final selection. High on the list is how others – including many of you – responded to my photographs. I often say that the photographer is the person least able to objectively view and understand his/her own work, and I value the feedback and response that you share with me. On the other hand, I like to include some photographs that get less attention because I believe in them. I also include examples from my diverse range of subjects – people, wildlife, landscape, cityscape and street, night photography.

Speaking of a range of subjects, this was a year of interesting and diverse photographic adventures. Some were familiar – visits to Death Valley, the nearby Pacific Coast, the streets of San Francisco, familiar Sierra locations, and more. Others reflect more recent interests, such the migratory birds of California’s Great Central Valley. I spent more than a week camped in a remote Sierra Nevada location with photographer friends, becoming deeply familiar with the details of that particular landscape. I traveled to urban destinations: New York City, London, Germany, Austria. I continued work on my long-term project to photograph classical musicians.

But, enough introduction. In no particular order, though grouped according to subject, here are some of my favorite photographs of 2013. For those who want to know more, I have included links to the original posts of the images, where you may read more background – click the images themselves or the “original post” links.

(I am on social media: My blog | Facebook | Google Plus | Flickr | Twitter | Pinterest | LinkedIn. And, yes, prints are available – see the Sales link for more information or send me an email.)

Coastal California

I am very fortunate to live relatively close to a huge range of photographic subjects. One of the closest and most impressive is the Pacific Ocean coastline of California, and it is near enough that I can head over there for a morning or an evening when the conditions seem promising.

Beach and Bluffs, Evening

Beach and Bluffs, Evening. Pacific Coast, California. August 2, 2013.

Evening light and fog along the Pacific coast north of Santa Cruz, California. (Original post)

Living less than an hour from the Pacific coastline south of San Francisco, I have the good fortune of being able to shoot there often, and I have come to know some sections of this coastline very well. On this summer evening I was cruising up the coast looking for subjects when I passed this familiar location, one that I had passed many times without stopping due to the scarcity of places to pull over on this narrow highway. The hazy fog, the warm evening light, and the curving surf line got my attention and this time I stopped, put a long lens on the camera, and made this exposure while standing far too close to the passing traffic.

Continue reading 2013 Favorite Photographs

RAW File Review – Rediscovering the Past

After returning from New York City last week, I took on the daunting task of reviewing about eight years worth of raw files. (Anyone who has tried probably just exclaimed, “yikes!,” or something much less polite… :-)

I’m _very_ conservative when it comes to deleting raw files, figuring that it is better to end up keeping files I don’t need than to find out that I trashed something that could have been useful. In addition, as I do an annual review of the previous year’s raw files every winter, I invariably discover a few good photographs that I had somehow passed over or failed to notice at the time I made them.

As non-fun as the process of reviewing tens of thousands of files can be, there are some worthwhile results, including:

  1. I do delete a fair number of just plain useless files that have been cluttering up my hard drive. I figure that if it wasn’t interesting a the time I took it, wasn’t interesting during my annual raw file review, and still isn’t interesting a few years later… it may be time to get rid of it.
  2. I find some (to me, anyway) real treasures that I had overlooked to misunderstood or simply forgotten at the time. At some point I’ll write more about why this happens, but it is not unusual to fail to understand how a photograph works right after making it. But when viewed with some temporal distance, some photographs turn out to surprise me by how successful they might be. So one of the pleasures of this otherwise daunting task is the discovery of such images.
  3. I relive experiences related to the making the photographs. When I view my own photographs, the visual imagery is always associated with non-visual experiences that were part of the process of making the photo. When I “rediscover” some of these older image – even some that turn out not to be photographically worthy of sharing – I also rediscover those experiences that I had forgotten and all sorts of memories return. (Among those in this batch are many of my family – especially fun during the week when our youngest son moved off to a different city of get his first job.)
  4. I learn things about my own photographic growth that might not be apparent when only considering the most current work. For example, I’m often struck by how certain themes and ways of seeing that I’ve come to recognize more recently were already present in work done quite a while ago. Understanding this is important, I think, to developing self-awareness as a photographer.