Today we’d like to introduce you to Mitch Miller.
Hi Mitch, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
As a boy, I was raised camping in the Pinnacles, San Francisco Peninsula, Yosemite, and the North Coast redwoods. My folks took me on short hikes that whetted my appetite for more such adventures. I moved with my folks to North Carolina for 11 years, and my love for my home state of California only grew. Upon my return it was smoggy the summer of 1979, and when the San Gabriel Mountains appeared on a clear day, I had to go there. Throughout the eighties and nineties, I backpacked and day-hiked that range, the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains, and best of all, the Sierra Nevada, always shooting 35mm slide film on my cameras.
To my surprise, I fell in love with the desert, primarily Joshua Tree National Monument. I spent my birthday there and my wife and I married there after it became a national park. We moved to Joshua Tree in 2017, and I soon became aware that I’d been shooting mostly adventure photography, a journalistic approach to my experiences.
We joined the Morongo Basin Cultural Arts Council and appeared on the Highway 62 Open Studio Art Tours. Our new friends were painters, sculptors, weavers, potters and more. I realized I needed to “up my game” and transitioned to landscape photography, in which the art was more about what I see or feel in nature than my own adventures.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I recall when I would order prints from my slides; I felt they died. The transmitted light of a slide show was so much more attractive than reflected light from a print. I studied Photoshop in 2000, and it was such a revelation to be able to bring out of a photograph what I felt at the time I was on-site or wanted to remember from the experience. My prints began to appear more like I expected them to.
And good equipment is not always light. It was only through regular hiking with the weight of the camera, possibly a tripod, and a hiker’s “ten essentials” that I could train to access more remote areas, and enjoy them, and not feel rushed so that I could take my time and compose and wait for the good light.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I specialize in Joshua Tree National Park, which obviously is photographed a lot. I do a few things differently. Many photographers like to use lighting for their foreground when photographing the night sky. I like to present “two moments at one scene on the same night.” I’ll set up my tripod and camera for the night and photograph sunset on the foreground, go to bed in my tent, wake up and shoot the night sky, then go back to bed. In the morning, I’ll capture a sunrise version of the scene. In post-processing, I’ll blend a day version with the night version of the scene and imagine I’ve looked at it by day, shut my eyes, then opened them at night, and this is how the image appears to me.
I also like to present the dimension of time in another way. I often feel deceased, inanimate, or dormant objects are best enjoyed in black and white to accent their shape and not their color. However, I don’t want to lose the color of stunning Mojave mound cactus flowers, or lichen, and more. I’ll turn the image black and white, then erase the conversion where there exists colors I want to “keep”. The result is the living shows in color, and the color sometimes exists because it is living. This accents the age or season differences between an ephemeral flower and the ancient rocks or dormant vegetation around it.
I’m most proud of my image “Upload”. It was 3 p.m., and I’d been in Joshua Tree National Park ten hours photographing on a day with two storms forecast. I tried to take a nap, but the wind was rocking the car too much to sleep. I looked out and saw the most incredible cloud with two faces, and they were angry. No time to sleep, I grabbed my camera and hastily made my way through flowers and cactus to find a foreground. Accomplishing that, I was able to take two photos before the wind disintegrated the faces.
Later, in post-processing, I changed only the sky to black and white to bring out the texture and drama in the clouds. The result won first place in photography at the Joshua Tree National Park Council of the Arts Expo. More rewarding, a favorite local painter commented it was the best photograph in the room.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
It was a huge revelation for me in 1988 when I attended an Outdoor Photographer magazine seminar near LAX. George Lepp was one of my favorite photographers and columnists. He put on a slide show that used 39 slide projectors with beautiful transitions and music. It was great inspiration soon thereafter when I went camping five nights solo at Death Valley over Thanksgiving. I photographed “everything” or tried to.
I always considered David Muench to be like the “Ansel Adams of color photography.” My favorite calendar used his photos on two-foot-high pages with the bottom 20% the dates. I was overjoyed to learn in 2015, he was teaching a one-day workshop in Joshua Tree National Park. It was a great day, and one of life’s favorite moments was showing him an image I’d just shot on my camera’s LCD and watching his delighted approval.
I consider the best “photography class” I’ve ever taken to be a graphic design class that was required for a certificate in web design at UCI Extension. That’s when I came to understand composition, and why I liked my photographs I liked, and how to repeat the “formula”.
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FineEarthPhotography
Image Credits
Mitch Miller
