Desert Morning Sky. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Cloudy skies clear above Death Valley in the early morning.
This photograph exemplifies a lesson I learned quite a few years ago about light and atmosphere and the potential of conditions that don’t look that promising. On that long-ago evening I had gone to the California coast below San Francisco in the evening to make photographs, only to find bleak, gray, hazy, obscured conditions that looked uninteresting and hardly worth photographing. But I stuck around. Right at sunset, somewhere to the west out over the Pacific, high above the murk the last light illuminated high clouds with brilliant color. It was as if the stage lights had been brought up on a beautiful set that had been hidden behind a scrim. In a moment a brilliant scene emerged out of, well, pretty much nothing.
I’m not sure that this morning equaled that first experience, but it was a reminder of how this can happen. As I arose in darkness it was apparent that overcast covered the sky. I drove north as the first faint light appeared, and it did not get better — once again words like “gray, murky, and blah” characterized the scene. Without a lot of hope for better prospects, I stopped and climbed to a high place to take a look. And shortly after literal sunrise the low clouds thinned and parted a bit, revealing a beautiful morning sky above.
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.
Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email
Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.
All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.