Eureka Valley Dunes, Twilight. Death Valley National Park, California. January 5, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Twilight on the curving hills of sand at the Eureka Valley Dunes, Death Valley National Park.
By the time I completed the long and bumpy drive from Stovepipe Wells to the Eureka Valley Dunes, the last 45 miles of washboarded gravel roads, it was getting to be quite late in the day. I did not take any time to set up camp when I arrived, being afraid that if I delayed at all I might miss the bit of good light that remained. So I parked, grabbed my camera and tripod and bag of lenses, and headed of into the lower reaches of these huge dunes.
As I began shooting, the sun was almost ready to drop below the ridges to the west of Eureka Valley, and I ended up only having a short time to photograph the actual direct sunset light on the west face of the dunes near where I would camp later that evening. But no problem – I actually love to shoot right past sunset and on into the twilight period when the color of the light can do all sorts of interesting and sometimes unexpected things, and when the overall quality of the light becomes much softer and more diffused. This was one of the last photographs I made on this evening. I was actually already starting my walk back to the camp ground, but I spotted this beautiful section of overlapping ridges in the dunes just as the light took on a rose coloration.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.