Category Archives: Photographs: Desert

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Salt Flats, Evening Shadows

April 9, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The evening shadows of mountains and clouds stretch across patterned salt flats.

The stark landscape of the desert is visually unique. Because there is little or no plant life (and what there is typically is sparse and small), the bare earth itself is revealed. Patterns of rock and soil and even water that would be hidden in a forested landscape are out in the open. In many cases there is little or nothing to provide a sense of visual scale — objects could be the size of baseballs or small cars and there is no way to tell. The landscape is often so large that haze and light play tricks, and cloud shadows play across the relatively plain playas and hills. Because the native colors are often subtle, any color from light (blue from shadows and warm tones in early and late light) can have a more profound effect.

Late on this day we visited the sunny side of this section of Death Valley, ascending the ramp of an immense gravel fan at the base of a canyon. The hills on this side of the valley were interesting, but looking back and across the valley very interesting patterns began to emerge. The far hills were already in the blue shadows of the oncoming evening, and the shadows of clouds raced across the nearer portions of the playa, which are here laced with their own patterns of flow channels and dried salt. Altogether these elements produced a landscape that seems more like an abstraction than a reality.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Dunes, Plants, Evening

April 8, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light on a cluster of plants growing among sand dunes.

The sand dunes in the evening can be many things — the wind may blow or it may be still, glaring light transitions through golden hour to blue after sunset, in the right spot one may photograph alone. Above all, this is a time of transition in the light, and there is a sweet spot — perhaps just as the sun drops behind mountains or clouds to the west — when the light is still directional but when all the harshness disappears, soft light remains, and colors invisible in the daytime begin to appear.

I made this photograph on the first evening of our recent visit to Death Valley. We had arrived in the middle of the day, driven off to explore a less-traveled canyon, returned to get settled in to our accommodations, and then headed out into the late day light. Bypassing the crowds at the iconic turn-outs, we kept going, and as the sun dropped toward the ridge of the western mountains we grabbed equipment and headed out across the playa toward a quieter area of the dunes where we might find untracked sand.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Death Valley, Morning Clouds

April 7, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning sun shines through atmospheric haze and clouds above Death Valley

Death Valley is a very big place, and getting to locations sometimes requires a lot of driving. Photographing there often requires a very early wakeup call, and I’m often on my way to some location in the park well before first light. Leaving during darkness, often for a place very different from where I’m staying, means I have to make some educated (and not so educated) guesses about what conditions might be like many miles away and at sometimes very different elevations. As result, I often do not know precisely what conditions I’ll find when I arrive at an early morning location.

Such was the case on this morning. The destination was more than 6000′ feet higher than where we were staying and many miles away. In the past I’ve arrived at this spot to find very strong winds and very cold temperature. This time the temperature wasn’t so bad but we did have winds. Just before arrival at the final destination the sky lit up briefly, so we halted and photographed from that location before continuing on… and watching the light die as the sun rose. We consoled ourselves — we had caught a brief bit of good light and it was a beautiful spot to be in, photographs or not. Since we were there we went ahead and made a few photographs, and as we did so the conditions began to improve in somewhat dramatic fashion. The earliest hint of the afternoon’s upcoming dust storm appeared in the distant milky haze through which beams of light passed. Higher clouds began to collect, and dramatic light cut across the face of the arid mountains below us.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Evening Dust and Rain

April 5, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Desert hills in evening dust storm and rain, Death Valley.

In retrospect I saw the first hints of where this day was headed way back at dawn. We went to a high and remote place overlooking the expanse of Death Valley before dawn. As we arrived there was a brief burst of very colorful light, but then clouds mostly muted the colors, and I noticed a distant glowing softness to the atmosphere which muted distant objects. I’ve seen this before at the start of days when dust storms developed. Indeed, by late morning, even though we were still high in the mountains we began to see towers of blowing dust in the distance and soon even the air up in the mountains took on the misty, soft quality that comes when dust blows in from a distance.

By mid-afternoon we left the mountains and headed back towards the valley lowlands, and before we got there we ran into tremendous winds and dust that filled the atmosphere and blocked the view in all directions. At time the dust was so thick that it “rained” sand and small pebbles. We arrived back at our starting point to wind so strong and dust so thick that we could only retreat and try to minimize the intrusion of dust and sand as the wind storm raged. In the early evening the winds began to abate and we looked outside to see a mysterious scene of dark, apocalyptic clouds of dust and rain falling over the mountains. A sane person might have stayed inside, but we couldn’t resist heading out into this wonderfully bizarre and evocative atmosphere of dying wind, blowing dust, suspended haze, clouds, and big drops of rain. As sunset approached, the conditions began to break up and the clouds thinned, and light passed through the thick atmosphere to reveal the shapes of clouds and the vague contours of desert mountains.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Desert

Salt Flats, Evening Shadows

Dunes, Plants, Evening

Death Valley, Morning Clouds

Evening Dust and Rain

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.