View allAll Photos Tagged Cliffs
Petrochelidon pyrrhonata,
Avila Beach, California
It looks like war, but I think it began with mating, while others nearby were collecting grass clippings for the mud nests. During the grass- or mud-collecting, there is much wing fluttering, and it seems like the "excitement" of one activity blends into the excitement of the other. But here there are actually three birds, with the one on top attacking what I believe is the male in the pair below it. It all happens very fast in swallow world.
Pentax K-1, HD Pentax-D FA 28-105mm f3.5-5.6 ED DC WR
Pentax Forums Daily Challenge: January 14, 2018
Growing boldly against the cliff walls of Yosemite Valley, the evergreen carpet of the forest floor and surrounding hills creeps to the very edge of the granite cliffs.
Technical details: Canon 5D MK II, Canon 300mm f/2.8L IS USM, ISO200, 1/15 sec at f/8.0 (IS off, mirror lock up on, circular polarizer)
Despite my absolute love for stormchasing, lightning and severe weather...a simple drive out to the Superstition Mountains before dawn when there is only a bit of rainy clouds in the forecast...can be just as beautiful and inspiring.
I love the awesomeness of a lightning storm. The adrenaline when I'm trying to get to a good spot for a tripod setup.
The morning I took this photograph wasn't like that. It was relaxing. Lazy. Rolling clouds, some rain in the distance...but nothing thrilling or exciting. Yet I ended up having just as much fun as I usually do. I don't believe I have ever been out on the Apache Trail before as the sun comes up. It was magical.
With a day predicted to have rain, you don't even know for sure if the drive out there will reward you with a sunrise because the clouds could definitely block out any light. But not on this day. The clouds kind of rolled in after the sun was up...and the light and shadows were magnificent.
On a total side topic...this was my first day out with the 5D Mark II. I only had a 2gb card because the others I ordered hadn't arrived yet. The RAW size is around 21-25mb, so the card could only hold around 60 images. Since most of the time I shoot six brackets per scene...I only had roughly 10 total shots I could take.
So of course I took my laptop with so I could dump photos to it as the morning progressed. Solution to the problem.
And of course I left the USB cable at home...so I couldn't do anything. Problem remained.
I have to say...it ended up being an interesting experiment. What brackets were actually not worth keeping in exchange for a new scene I just found? Was the new scene better or worse than what I already had? Was I going to cry because I deleted one road shot for another?
I was a nice exercise in self-control. Usually we just fire off millions of shots during a photowalk or excursion like this (and I'm not saying we shouldn't, I certainly wont stop), but it did teach me to take a bit of pause and make absolutely certain this was a shot I wanted.
ON YET ANOTHER NOTE, check out my guest blog post over on Justin Balog's blog, Light as Magic! Thanks for asking me Justin to be a part of your Out the Front Door series...was a blast to write!
(exif: canon eos 5d mark ii, 50mm 1.4, iso100, f/10)
A UNESCO world heritage site and probably the most famous spot in all of Ireland, but for good reason! The wind was howling and it was raining sideways both times I visited but I didn't care at all about that. I had a great time hanging out here for a bit as the pictures you see (imo) can't really compare to actually standing there looking over the cliffs in person. An absolutely amazing destination!
Press "L" to view in Lightbox.
Hua Shan (华山) is the westernmost of the five sacred Taoist mountains. Originally known as Xiyue (Western Mountain), it has a long history of religious significance. As early as the 2nd century BC, there was a Daoist temple known as the Shrine of the Western Peak located at its base. Daoists believed that in the mountain lives the god of the underworld. The temple at the foot of the mountain was often used for spirits mediums to contact the god and his underlings. Unlike Taishan, which became a popular place of pilgrimage, because of its inaccessibility to the summit, Huashan only received Imperial and local pilgrims, and was not well visited by pilgrims from the rest of China. Huashan was also an important place for immortality seekers, as many herbal Chinese medicines are grown and powerful drugs were reputed to be found there. Kou Qianzhi (365–448), the founder of the Northern Celestial Masters received revelations there, as did Chen Tuan (920–989), who spent the last part of his life in hermitage on the west peak. In the 1230s, all the temples on the mountain came under control of the Daoist Quanzhen School.
Legend dictates that Hua Shan gained it's five summits because a god split the mountain in two with a giant axe, to rescue his mother who had been trapped inside by an evil daemon.
I think this is limestone forming the cliffs of Deadhorse Gulch, the little tributary canyon of Glenwood Canyon where the Hanging Lake Trail runs. One of these days, I'm going to go back up there with a good camera, though the place is always absurdly busy when the weather's nice. I'll probably have to wait for another winter trip to Colorado.
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Cliffs, Morning Light. Zion National Park, Utah. October 22, 2012. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell - all rights reserved.
Immense cliffs in the Pine Creek Canyon area of Zion National Park.
This was an interesting morning, as much for its place in the sequence of events on this trip to photograph in Utah as for the actual photographic opportunities. I have noticed, and other photographers I've spoken with about this seem to agree to at least some extent, that there is sometimes a sort of "getting up to speed" element to certain types of shooting when you are getting started. I recall mentioning this to one photographer friend in the context of a discussion about the idea that you should always have a clear vision for your photograph before you make it - a theoretical concept that most photographers I know acknowledge to be unrealistic and perhaps even a bad idea. (This is not to say that thinking about what your "capture" may look like as a photograph is unimportant, but rather an acknowledgement that things are often more complex than the simplistic notion suggests and that sometimes we, quite honestly, don't really know for sure which images will work or why.) When the idea of waiting for a really good image before making a photograph came up, I shared the observation that I sometimes have to "prime the pump" but simply starting to make some photographs, even if I'm not convinced that the first ones will be great. (One friend then referred to this as "photographic foreplay." ;-)
The previous day we had driven to St. George, Utah from the San Francisco Bay Area - a LONG drive - and finally stumbled into a motel in St. George close to midnight. (As I recall, the motel advertised something like "The Cheapest Rooms in St. George!") Up in the morning for precisely the free breakfast that you might expect in such a place - I resisted and instead walked across the street to a Starbucks - we left early and headed into Zion. As I recall we did not spend much, if any, time in Zion Canyon, and we were soon heading up the Mount Carmel highway, still having made no photographs. Finally, as we turned a few switchbacks on the initial climb, we saw some interesting light on the cliffs across the canyon, pulled over, got our cameras and lenses and tripods and made some photographs. I'm not sure that any of them were exactly remarkable, but with this first "shoot" (priming the pump) our work was now underway.
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.