Tag Archives: photographs

2023: Favorite Photos

It is that time again — time to share favorite photographs from the past year. I am sharing “2023: Favorite Photos,” including a dozen representative images. I think it is a diverse set, and I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Below is a single image of the full set of twelve. Subjects include the Sierra Nevada (of course!), Death Valley (also of course!), the California coast, birds in California’s Central Valley, a macro photograph, an urban landscape from Manhattan, and several photographs from our 10-week visit to (mostly) Southern Europe.

It is a group of 12 images chosen from among my 2023 favorites — not necessarily my “12 Best Photographs” of the year. (See the difference?) The process of winnowing the set down to a dozen left out other favorites. I like all of those photographs, but I chose these because they represent a variety of work and cover some of the main experiences, places, and subjects of 2023.

I’ll post each photo separately below, too, adding a bit of narration to each image. I hope you enjoy them!

The individual photographs follow, in no particular order, accompanied by brief descriptions. Click the photographs to display them larger. Click their titles to see and read the original posts, which include more descriptive text. You may leave comments and questions at the end of this article.

Our long visit (ten weeks!) to Europe last summer was wonderful, but I missed almost the whole summer in “my Sierra Nevada.” (I haven’t yet figured out how to be in two places at once.) But once we returned to the USA I turned my attention to the mountains and made my first visit of the (tail end of) summer in mid-September. I was on the East Side on this stormy evening when the sky and clouds above Mono Lake lit up, providing a dramatic and spectacular light show.


Continue reading 2023: Favorite Photos

Lodi Sandhill Crane Festival

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.

Cranes and Geese, Winter Fog
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.

Two Sandhill Cranes in Flight
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.

Taking Flight, Sandhill Cranes
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.

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“Birdscapes” at Stellar Gallery

Birdscapes — David Hoffman and G Dan Mitchell
Birdscapes — David Hoffman and G Dan Mitchell

A Stellar Gallery Special Exhibit

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!

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What I’m Working On Today

What I'm Working On — 10/22/2018
What I’m Working On Today — 10/22/2018

What I’m Working On Today. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

For fun, today I’m also sharing a little shot of part of my computer screen. It shows several of the threads I’m working on right now. I’m getting close, most likely, to the end of this year’s Eastern Sierra autumn color photographs. (Though western Sierra photography is up and coming right about now.) I’m plunging back into the huge collection of photographs I made as we traveled this past summer — on the screen there are currently photographs from Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, and Heidelberg, with a few other locations yet to come.

But I’m not just working on new photographs — some older work is also on my mind this week. I am a member of a San Francisco night photography collective known as Studio Nocturne. We have a small show right now at Farley’s Coffee in San Francisco, each of us has a piece in the SOMArts exhibit, and our San Francisco ArtSpan 2018 Open Studio is next week at ARCH Supplies in San Francisco. This means printing and mounting and labeling various pieces, including the dark photograph of a Central California donut shop at the top of this window.

And there’s more! I’m also working on a number of prints for Stellar Gallery in the Yosemite Area — some for a new exhibit that is just going up there and some to be sent to collectors who have made recent purchases. No, those aren’t on the screen at the moment… but they will be very soon!


See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.