Dried Winter Flower. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Dried desert wildflowers, Panamint Range, Death Valley National Park.
As someone once wrote, “There’s always something to see!” Occasionally I have to work at reminding myself of this, and then I have to work at doing the “seeing.” My recent January trip to Death Valley was a case in point. This is a place I know well, and where I usually can find plentiful subjects to photograph, and where conditions usually are not an impediment. In fact, the conditions regarded as challenging — things like dust storms — often turn out to be photographically compelling. However, on this trip things often seemed a bit… blah. There were thick clouds and a heavy atmosphere, with a sort of gray and murky effect that did not seem to provide many opportunities to photograph the grand landscape and which left a kind of flat light that wasn’t even great for more intimate subjects.
As I often remind myself, if I’m in the field often enough that I manage to encounter spectacular conditions I have to accept that sometimes I’ll experience the opposite, too. So in conditions like these I have strategies. One is to simply slow down and enjoy being in the place — and I did quite a bit of that on this trip, taking time to wander up some quiet washes and to poke around odd back-country places. Another is to look where I don’t usually look. This photograph came about from a combination of those focuses. Driving a gravel road “in the middle of nowhere” I noticed an abandoned side road, stopped, got out and walked along it, discoing some old mining remnants. As I walked back toward my vehicle I realized that the surrounding terrain was full of winter plants holding a remarkable number of these dried flowers, something I hadn’t noticed here before.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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