Desert Wash at Base of Tucki Mountain, Dusk. Death Valley National Park, California. March 29, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Soft rose-colored dusk light illuminates an alluvial fan below a canyon at the base of Tucki Mountain, Death Valley National Park.
This is one of several photographs from the recent Death Valley trip that beg the question, “Is that color real?!”*
Yes, this really is the color of the light from this scene.
I learned quite a while ago that the interesting light most definitely does not end at sunset – often the best and most interesting light comes after the sun has set. Sunset on this evening had been quite interesting, but a few minutes after the sun set the last brilliant red light struck high clouds overhead and lit up the entire scene with this lurid and intense wash of color.
The scene is a large desert gravel wash where a drainage canyon spills out into Death Valley at the base of Tucki Mountain and forms a huge alluvial fan. I had climbed to the top of a low hill to shoot late afternoon and sunset light, so I had a good vantage point to view this wash beyond intervening hills. Tucki Mountain itself is a massive lump of a mountain that rises above Stovepipe Wells – what it lacks in terms of an impressive and jagged summit peak in makes up for by means of its sheer bulk. It constitutes a large spur off of the Panamint Range and almost seems like a small sub-range all by itself.
*After I originally wrote the text to this post I made a 12″ x 16″ test print of this photograph. As I often do, I put the print out on a table in our living room so that I can see it in a context other than that of my small studio. My wife, who is a very perceptive viewer and who has seen the results of, uh, printer errors (for real fun, print on the back side of your paper by accident some time…) looked at these colors and said, “Is something wrong with your printer?” Ah, I love critics! ;-)
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Be reassured that I don’t “love” all critics in the exact same way… ;-)
“I love critics!” he writes … which makes someone wonder since it’s plural! ;-)
Thanks so much, Mike! I do a fair amount of black and white work, too, but sometimes the subtleties of color gradations seem more effective to me, even in nearly monochromatic scenes when the “chroma” is something besides black!
Someone I know who is a very fine photographer who knows is black and white as well as anyone got me thinking that in many cases it is actually harder to do this in color than in BW.
Take care,
Dan
Dan,
I really enjoy your monochromatic color work.. The black and white snobs like to pick on those of us who do mostly color but the subtle shades seen in a lot of your desert work speaks for itself. i also do some low key color shots wich I have lot of fun with processing in the LAB color space ( with thanks to my favorite photoshop guru, Dan Margulis) Mike
It was my first thought too. Maybe this is a case where the story to the image helps the image… . :)
Lovely color though.