Desert Mountains, Pre-Dawn Haze. Death Valley National Park, California. April 7, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Desert mountain ridges in pre-dawn “blue hour” light rise above Death Valley and recede to highest peaks in the distance
On this April 2013 visit to Death Valley I encountered some very challenging light situations. What you hope for on an early morning like this is beautiful, colorful dawn light, perhaps preceded by a warm pre-dawn glow and followed by bright morning light. But when it came to beautiful early morning light – and evening light, too – I got precious little of it this time. On two mornings a thin overcast and atmospheric haze pretty much killed the dawn light. On one other morning I got some light, but still had to deal with the haze. The clouds were with me on a couple of the evenings, too. I have sort of learned to pretty much go with this flow and accept that difficult light as the balance in the universe that gave me, and will give me again, astonishingly beautiful light.
However, even in such light I try to see what I can find to shoot, and sometimes it provokes me to see things that I might otherwise have overlooked completely. On this morning I was up well before dawn and I headed off to a specific location that I had scouted earlier. I had two possible sorts of photographs in mind for this spot. One involved the view back down and across the main valley, and the other was planned around the arrival of first light on these rugged and stratified hills along the west side of the valley. I got to my spot, was relieved to find that the air was fairly still, and I settled in to wait for the dawn… which never quite came. It was so murky and the light was blocked by so many clouds to the east that I wasn’t even really quite certain when dawn occurred. Things got lighter… but remained hazy. I made this photograph at a moment when, on a clearer morning, these hills might have begun to assume a warm colored glow from light in the eastern sky. But this time it was all blue. The hazy sky was blue, and the mountains were as well. Since the conditions were somewhat unusual, I went ahead and made some exposures. When I first looked at the results I wasn’t very thrilled. But as I looked at them more, especially at very large sizes, I began to appreciate the softer and lower-contrast lighting and the way that details in the formations of the mountains actually become quite visible.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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.
From what I have read, the haze you encountered in April came from the Gobi desert. I was in the Sierra Nevadas the first week in October shooting Fall colors. A little rain/snow front came through and the next day was very clear. But, the day after that the haze was back. On Oct. 13 I headed south through the Owens Valley and the haze was very thick.
The gentle breeze wasn’t from the right direction to be smoke from the recent fires, and wasn’t strong enough to be kicking up the dust from Owens Lake. It looked like smog, but that’s a long way from the LA basin.
Any clue as to why the air quality in the Owens Valley seems to be getting more polluted, as this seems to be an increasingly prevalent problem?
Hmmm… I’m sure that the general trend is toward more air pollution worldwide, though I haven’t noticed anything especially unusual east of the Sierra. (The Central Valley of the state is another matter entirely!)
This photograph was made in Death Valley during a week of the (common) early April winds and the resultant dust storms. In this case, the haze was a local and natural event.
Dan