Patricia Emerson Mitchell and I are presenting a Silicon Valley Open Studios event this weekend. Here’s a video preview of our open studio.
We will have many of our prints available for viewing and purchase, with some excellent discounts available. We’ll also have related items, including signed copies of my California fall color book and Patty’s beautiful cards.
We’ll be open on Saturday, May 20 and Sunday, May 21 from 11:00 AM until 5:00PM. More details are available at the Silicon Valley Open Studios website, or by contacting us, including by posting a comment here. Direct links to our Open Studio pages, including location maps, are listed below:
Every November there is a Sandhill Crane Festival in Lodi, California, celebrating the return of these marvelous birds. I’ve been meaning to enter some of my crane photographs for the past few years, and this year I finally did. Here are the three photographs appearing in the art exhibit at the festival.
I made the first one, “Cranes and Geese, Winter Fog” on a marvelous February morning a while ago. I had never seen so many birds at once, nor seen them quite this active. On top of that, the tule fog was just beginning to break up, and the atmosphere was luminous.
A foggy San Joaquin Valley winter landscape filled with geese and cranes
The second is “Two Sandhill Cranes in Flight,” a juxtaposition of two of the birds against the blue winter sky.
A pair of lesser sandhill cranes in flight above California’s San Joaquin Valley
Finally, “Taking Flight, Sandhill Cranes” is a photograph of a group of cranes taking off from a shallow pond and heading toward the faint light of the rising sun on a very foggy morning.
A group of sandhill cranes takes to the morning sky above foggy marshland
If you are curious about these birds and want to know more and you life in Central California, a trip to the Lodi Sandhill Crane Festival this weekend can get you started. In addition to the art exhibit, there are lectures and guided tours to some of the nearby locations where you can find these birds. And the birds are there — I saw thousands of them this morning.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
Photographs by David Hoffman and G Dan Mitchell February 16th to March 14th, 2019 at Stellar Gallery, Yosemite Gateway Gallery Row 40982 Hwy 41, Suite 1, Oakhurst CA 93644
Artists Reception, Saturday Feb 16th – 5 to 8 pm
BIRDSCAPES features works by two photographers best known for landscape photography. Both Dave and G Dan are not only inspired by the beauty of wild lands and natural places, they are inspired by their flora and fauna as well. Birds are an integral part of most environments. Their nesting habits, migration patterns and survival strategies express volumes about the places they live, and ultimately our own habitat as well.
David Hoffman
Over the many years during which I have been involved in photography, I would have described my field of interest as landscape and nature with the emphasis on landscape. Wildlife of any sort was usually something that fortuitously showed up to be incidentally included in a landscape photograph.
In recent years I began photographing winter wetland landscapes in the Pacific Flyway and migratory birds naturally became a feature of many of the landscape images. As time went on, the birds went from being a mere feature of the landscape to being deliberately featured in their wetland habitat.
The photographs that I have included in the exhibit Birdscapes run the gamut from huge flocks of geese in the Pacific Flyway to a portrait of a hummingbird.
G Dan Mitchell
I have photographed the landscape for years, but more recently the photographs have included birds. I began to photograph birds in the locations I visit — geese and sandhill cranes in California’s Central Valley, brown pelicans along the Pacific coast, tundra swans and golden eagles near Oregon’s Klamath Lakes, trumpeter swans in Washington’s Skagit Valley. Migratory birds connect us to remote landscapes where they breed. Their presence brings landscapes to life. The sound of thousands of geese and cranes in the pre-dawn cold of a winter morning always makes me smile.
The photographs in “Birdscapes” come from several of these locations. They represent multiple ways of “seeing” birds. Some look closely at individuals, often focusing on the beauty of the birds in flight and the moments of take-off and landing. In others thousands of birds fill the sky. Almost all reflect the light and atmosphere of the places where birds are found —morning and evening twilight, colorful light of dawn and sunset, fog and clouds, or crystal-clear winter skies.
The galleries at Gallery Row in Oakhurst offer a wide selection of fine art and fine craft, and host exhibits and special events that support the arts in the Yosemite area. Thank you for supporting the arts!
This post is partially about this photograph, partially about birds, and partially about an upcoming event. Stick with me for a moment, and I’ll explain. I came a bit late to photographing birds, having photographed landscapes and other subjects for many years before thinking to approach this subject. For a long time I didn’t regard myself as a “birder” type, but I had a few bird encounters that started me steering in this direction roughly a decade ago. Two of them involved the Pacific Northwest. Back then I did the long drive from the San Francisco Bay Area up to Seattle over two days, starting in the afternoon and passing through the upper Sacramento Valley around dusk. I was amazed to see tens or thousands of birds in the beautiful evening sky, and my interest was piqued. On another visit to Seattle I found myself with a free day and I headed up to the Skagit Valley, not really knowing what I’d see. Soon after arriving I pulled over at a bend in the road near the crossing of the river, and to my astonishment tens of thousands of snow geese descended into the field next to where I had parked.
Since that time photographing birds has become important to me. I’ve come to think of it largely as “birdscape” photography, more about the place of the birds in their landscape and generally not so much about individual birds. I often (though not exclusively) photograph them in flocks, and I work to position them as part of their environment.
And, there is a show coming up! My friend David Hoffman and I are doing a joint exhibit at Stellar Gallery — in Oakhurst at the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park. The opening reception will be on February 16 at the Gallery — I’ll share more information soon, and I hope to see you there!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
