Tag Archives: yosemite

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

Bridal Veil Creek

November 2, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Bridal Veil Creek rushes and curves through boulders and forest, Yosemite Valley

This photograph has been sitting quietly in the RAW file archive for five years. I made a note to myself last year to go back and revisit it, and I left the note sitting on my computer desktop… but didn’t get back to it until this week.

This is a fairly classic Yosemite Valley scene, I think, being along the banks of Bridal Veil Creek not far below the famous waterfall with the same name. As I usually do, I had made a spring trip to the Valley to photograph during the period of high water and green foliage and had probably just indulged my tradition of arriving in the Valley and standing in the spray of this waterfall before getting down to the business of making photographs. I considered a color rendition of this photograph, with the subtle colors of the rocks and the water, but decide to go with a more “classic” black and white image – and, yes, I thought about some specific photographs by certain well-known photographers of Valley subjects that also focus on densely complex scenes with lots of details, a type of photographic challenge that I enjoy.

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: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Dana Meadow, Kuna Crest

October 5, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dry summer grasses in Dana Meadow near Tioga Pass, forest leading to Kuna Crest

I think of this photograph as being, in some ways, very unremarkable. In a few other ways there are some things that are at least a bit unusual about it, though this probably isn’t obvious. The scene is one that is familiar to anyone who has driven over Tioga Pass between the eastern Sierra and Yosemite National Park and west side destinations. The Yosemite Sierra along this route is a very diverse place, but the large sub-alpine meadows surrounded by forest and higher peaks is very common and characteristic of the area. Sierra visitors are also probably familiar with the annual seasonal transition from lush, green meadows to drier, brown meadows.

So what is a bit unusual about this scene? For one thing, I shot it during more or less the midday hours. This is not typically when I photograph scenes like this one, but this daytime view is probably the sort of thing that we see most often when we are actually there in the range. The color of the meadow grass is also a bit unusual – not that this coloration occurs, but that it happened so early in the season this year. The almost complete absence of green in the meadow is more characteristic of a time several weeks later than this early August date, when typically we might see a combination of dry and lush. But this year has been anything but a typical one in the Sierra and in much of California. Last winter was extremely dry, and there was barely any precipitation after the new year started – and this was the second drought year in a row. The conditions in the Sierra, as seen here, are not unprecedented, but they are very unusual.

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

Solitary Tree, Glacial Erratic Boulders

September 27, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A solitary tree grows on granite slabs, surrounded by glacial erratic boulders

I made this photograph at a well-known and increasingly iconic location along the Tioga Pass Road as it passes along the Sierra high country terrain as it ascends toward Tioga Pass. This spot could probably serve as a prime lesson about how many other opportunities and ways to see there are for Sierra photographers, even when shooting with certain big, famous iconic features only a few degrees of tripod swivel away! (It is OK to photograph the icons, too – we all do it. But it is more rewarding I think, to also look beyond such things to see the much larger and equally beautiful world around them.)

The basics of looking beyond icons involve, well, looking around. A first step might be to go ahead and photograph the icon a few times, get to know it, and perhaps eventually shoot it when there is something a bit different about it – unusual weather conditions, a different time of day, out of season, etc. But the next step is to look in other directions, poke around a bit, and think about just what else contributes to the subjective experience of being in that place. I come to this spot frequently just before sunrise, and at that time the beautiful glacial erratic boulders strewn about the terrain are highlighted by the slanting, warm light and some of the more distant features are beautifully obscured by shadow and atmospheric haze.

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

Dome and Meadow Trees

September 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Beams of sunset light, shining through breaks in clouds, momentarily illuminate Tuolumne Meadows trees and the granite slopes of Lembert Dome

This is a sort of companion photograph to one I posted earlier that was taken at about the same time, but more tightly composed and focusing on just the shoulder of Lembert Dome and the slopes of Mount Dana beyond. This was one of those Sierra evenings that started out with very mediocre light, but which also held the potential for something special to happen if things were to play out just the right way. Due to a wildfire over the crest near Mammoth Lakes, the sky was quite hazy. A high layer of clouds added to the gloom. I had spent the early evening trying to find some way to photograph these conditions, but was coming up short.

Not too long before I made this photograph, I had seen the gray murk suddenly lit by the warm glow of light coming underneath the edge of the high clouds far to the west as the sun dropped toward the horizon. This is not an uncommon event when the conditions line up correctly in the high Sierra, but this time it was a bit different due to the haze. The light, which might otherwise have been so colorful and bright as to almost be beyond belief, was instead muted and softened, though no less warm. A few minutes before I shot this image, the scene had been quite different – the sun had been behind those high clouds. But as I watched this it looked to me like the sun might find its way through a gap in the clouds, so I was ready to swing my camera to the east and capture Lembert Dome and other features in this light. Here that warm evening light glances across the face of the dome and softly lights some trees at the edge of the forest around Tuolumne Meadows.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: yosemite

Bridal Veil Creek

Dana Meadow, Kuna Crest

Solitary Tree, Glacial Erratic Boulders

Dome and Meadow Trees

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