Badlands Gully. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.
A deeply forrowed and eroded badlands gully, Death Valley National Park.
This scene may look familiar — I shared a vertical-orientation photograph of the same subject a few weeks ago. Often a subject strongly suggests either the vertical “portrait” orientation or the horizontal “landscape” arrangement. But sometimes a subject can work either way, albeit with different effects. Here I feel that the vertical interpretation more strongly followed the upward trajectory of the central gully, but that this version embeds it more firmly in the converging diagonal lines on the sides and emphasizes its curve.
This is not a major Death Valley feature. If you went to the location where I made the photograph you might not notice it. The gully is relatively small and high on a hillside, so I used a long focal length to frame it tightly. (I’m a big fan of long focal lengths for landscape photography.) It was early enough that the light was not yet intense and stark, and a bit of high cloudiness softened it a bit more.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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