Detail, Overlapping Gullies – Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. February 20, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Detail photograph of the patterns of overlapping gullies near Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park.

I have been working on a sort of informal project to photograph small details at Zabriskie Point that do not necessarily reveal the larger, familiar, and very iconic landscape of the place. A few years ago I noticed – almost by accident – that certain features of the surrounding landscape can be photographed in conditions quite different from the “standard” dawn and very early morning lighting. In fact, some of the geology can, I think, be photographed in interesting ways even during unusual times of the day when there is full sunlight. A bit later in the morning the light, which tends to glance across the tops of some features earlier in the day, begins to penetrate down into the little valleys and gullies and reflect into them from some of the brighter surfaces. While it can work in full sun, it may work even better when there is a bit of overcast, as there was when I made this photograph and a couple others in the series.

With this specific subject I also tend to work from a bit of a distance using long focal length lenses. This one was shot at 400mm! This poses a problem that we don’t encounter as often when using more (supposedly) typical landscape focal lengths, namely that it is hard to get the whole subject in focus due to depth of field issues that become more apparent with such long lenses.

Also, when photographing these rather pale and pastel formations, it is very easy to succumb to the temptation to jazz things up a bit. To be honest, I have seen some very good and interesting work that relied on amplifying contrast and the subtle colors. However, I’m trying hard to not go too far with this. I certainly do some work in post to balance things out a bit and to get the effect that I think best evokes what I recall of the scene, but I’m avoiding the inclination to, for example, adjust curves to the point that I get a lot of pure blacks and whites in this subject that mostly contains bright mid-tones.

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