Playa and Mountains, Last Light. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Twiilight winter sky above Death Valley playa and the Panamint Mountains.
On one hand, I’m fortunate enough to live where I can get to Death Valley in a single day of driving. On the other hand, it is a rather long day! I was on the road close to 6:00AM. (Sometimes I leave earlier, but we were out the night before.) I don’t stop a lot on these drives, but even so it was close to 3:00 by the time I got to the place where I planned to camp… only do realize that this was a long weekend and there were actual crowds in Death Valley. I’m more used to seeing very few people there this time of year. This fact cost me a bit of extra time figuring out where to camp, and by the time I got that sorted out and headed out for evening photography it was pretty late in the day.
This is my way of saying that I had to make more or less a snap decision to commit to a general location and go there quickly. By the time I arrived there wasn’t going to be a lot of light left and I soon found myself photographing end-of-day and evening light. But what a beautiful sky it was! Desert dawn and sunset skies can, at least when there are some clouds, be exceptionally beautiful. I think one reason is that they stand above a landscape that is often stark and bare. (In the right conditions, that emptiness can be a canvas painted by this light.) On this evening there were a few clouds right above the Panamint Mountains, with one straggler stretching high into the sky against a lovely gradient transitioning from brightly lit clouds to the deep blue of oncoming night.
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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