Salt Flats Near Badwater. Death Valley National Park, California. April 2, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Evening on the salt flats near Badwater – Death Valley National Park.

I have to admit that this is a bit of a cliche photography location. I’ve been both lucky and unlucky when shooting here. In terms of photographs of the Panamint Range – which towers above the west side of Death Valley and is not really visible in this photo – I’ve been lucky: on several occasions I’ve had wonderful late afternoon clouds with light columns shining through as the sun dropped behind the mountains. On the other hand, I’ve found it difficult to shoot these formations on the salt flats. Earlier this year, I shot there with my my brother, who pointed me to a spot a bit south of where I had attempted to photograph these features in the past, and it turned to be a better location.

In my experience, photographing these “ridges on the salt flat” is a bit tricky. It would be hard – very hard – to photograph them in full sunlight, so it is more typical to shoot them late in the day after the sun drops behind the Panamints. However, once this happens the light comes mostly from the open sky, and it turns the “white” salt quite blue, necessitating some post processing in order to get an image that reminds one of what it actually looked like at the time. In addition, in order to get the ridges themselves to be visible, an ultra wide angle lens is often called for – which makes it more difficult to get some scale from the distant mountains. An interesting sky is helpful. The salt flats are a fairly low contrast subject so, again, some work outside the camera is likely to be needed in order to get the interesting textures to be visible in the photo.

So, what did I do in this photo? At the time of the shot I used, perhaps obviously, a very wide angle lens. This let me get very close to the interesting formations and fill a good portion of the frame with them. Needless to say, it is also important to look around a bit for the more interesting patterns and then to think about how they fit in the composition. In addition, I shot with the glow from the western sky coming from the right – the sky imparts a bit of color to the salt and the low angle cross light gives a bit more relief. I framed the image with the end of the valley centered high in the frame, and I feel that the low ridges draw my eye downward toward the main area of the salt formations and that the ridges may even echo the shapes of the ridges in the salt a bit. But this photograph would not have worked without some careful post-processing in my “digital darkroom.” Different curves were applied to the lower (salt flat) and upper (distant mountains and sky) sections of the image, and some work was done with color balance and saturation in the lower portion.

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