Category Archives: Photographs: Southern California

From the Panamints to the Sierra, Evening

From the Panamints to the Sierra, Evening
From the Panamints to the Sierra, Evening

From the Panamints to the Sierra, Evening. Death Valley National Park, California. March 30, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The Sierra Nevada in evening light as seen from Aguereberry Point in Death Valley National Park’s Panamint Range.

I made this photograph from Aguereberry Point shortly before sunset. Aguereberry Point is a lonely prominence over 6000′ above Death Valley, high in the Panamint Mountain range, a place of astonishing panoramic views – and often some significant winds. As I drove the gravel road to the point late in the afternoon I saw three or four other vehicles heading the other direction, but when I arrived at the point a bit more than an hour before sunset no one else was there.

Having photographed here a few times previously, I am becoming more familiar with the challenges and the opportunities of shooting here. One of the challenges – as is the case in many spots in Death Valley – is that certain subjects seem to be “photographable” at very specific times and only for short intervals. One of the most interesting views from Aguereberry is southeast down into Trail Canyon and on to the lower slopes of Wildrose Peak beyond. This is wild, rugged, austere terrain. However, because it lies on the east side of this range the light changes quickly from a washed out blast of daytime sun to sudden deep shadows as the sun drops behind the higher ridges of the Panamints. (Trail Canyon is not seen in this photograph.)

Another challenge is that, impressive and overwhelming as the scale of this grand scene is, it can be difficult to pull interesting compositions out of it. I tend to work with longer lenses here, both to isolate smaller areas out of the huge landscape and to compress distance. In this photograph, the silhouetted crest of the highest part of the Sierra Nevada range is on the horizon, with the intervening ridges of the Panamint Range and others probably including the Inyo Mountains and the ridge just west of Panamint Valley.

And, since I tend towards those large and long lenses… wind is an issue! And on top of Aguereberry Point there is nothing to stop the often strong winds of Death Valley. On this evening the winds were howling, so I found a spot below some rocks where it was a bit less windy and then spent a lot time waiting for momentary lulls in the wind when I could make photographs.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Detail, Overlapping Gullies – Zabriskie Point

Detail, Overlapping Gullies - Zabriskie Point
Detail, Overlapping Gullies - Zabriskie Point

Detail, Overlapping Gullies – Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. February 20, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Detail photograph of the patterns of overlapping gullies near Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park.

I have been working on a sort of informal project to photograph small details at Zabriskie Point that do not necessarily reveal the larger, familiar, and very iconic landscape of the place. A few years ago I noticed – almost by accident – that certain features of the surrounding landscape can be photographed in conditions quite different from the “standard” dawn and very early morning lighting. In fact, some of the geology can, I think, be photographed in interesting ways even during unusual times of the day when there is full sunlight. A bit later in the morning the light, which tends to glance across the tops of some features earlier in the day, begins to penetrate down into the little valleys and gullies and reflect into them from some of the brighter surfaces. While it can work in full sun, it may work even better when there is a bit of overcast, as there was when I made this photograph and a couple others in the series.

With this specific subject I also tend to work from a bit of a distance using long focal length lenses. This one was shot at 400mm! This poses a problem that we don’t encounter as often when using more (supposedly) typical landscape focal lengths, namely that it is hard to get the whole subject in focus due to depth of field issues that become more apparent with such long lenses.

Also, when photographing these rather pale and pastel formations, it is very easy to succumb to the temptation to jazz things up a bit. To be honest, I have seen some very good and interesting work that relied on amplifying contrast and the subtle colors. However, I’m trying hard to not go too far with this. I certainly do some work in post to balance things out a bit and to get the effect that I think best evokes what I recall of the scene, but I’m avoiding the inclination to, for example, adjust curves to the point that I get a lot of pure blacks and whites in this subject that mostly contains bright mid-tones.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Last Light on Desert Plants, Death Valley

Last Light on Desert Plants, Death Valley
Last Light on Desert Plants, Death Valley

Last Light on Desert Plants, Death Valley. Death Valley National Park, California. February 20, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last light of a winter day lights the plants at the edge of a wash in Death Valley National Park, California.

On this afternoon I drove a bit up the east side of the Valley past the turnoff to Beatty looking for subjects to shoot along the hills that parallel the valley. I did not initially have a specific shot in mind, since this isn’t an area that I know very well – I’ve mostly driven past it on my way to some other place. I was generally thinking of a couple of possibilities. One was an early evening photograph looking up into one of the very large canyons, probably include the massive washes that spill out of them and aiming for a very rugged looking image. I looked for a few such places and played around a bit with the idea of shooting one or two, but it wasn’t quite working for me.

I have included some low hills along this area called, I believe, the Kit Fox Hills, in some photographs that I have made of this area from way over near Mesquite Dunes. These hills which sit just above the road toward Scotty’s Castle have intrigued me, so I had also looked at them. As I passed them earlier in the afternoon I made a mental note to come back and check out one particular spot in better light, and when the canyon idea didn’t seem to work out I decided to head back there. I was probably a bit late in settling on this subject, but I arrived while the sun was still (just barely) above the tops of the ridges on the opposite side of the Valley. I grabbed equipment and went to a spot where I thought I could use a particular mesquite plant as foreground to a shot of these low hills, but then this backlit expanse of the floor of the Valley filled with these small, rugged plants caught my attention. I decide to photograph them before turning my attention back to the mesquite and hills. As I shot a few frames the sun began to drop behind the far hills much sooner than I expected, and this was close to the last photograph I made before I was in shadow.

All seriousness aside, someone just suggested that an alternate title for this photograph might be “Sea of Tribbles!” ;-)

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Saltgrass and Water from a Salt Spring

Saltgrass and Water from a Salt Spring
Saltgrass and Water from a Salt Spring

Saltgrass and Water from a Salt Spring. Death Valley National Park, California. February 21, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Saltgrass grows into water from a salt spring at the edge of salt flats in Death Valley National Park.

This is another image from my productive half hour or so on the edge of the Death Valley salt flats near a salt spring on a cloudy February morning. These shallow pools obviously have the potential to reflect light and shape from the clouds and the surrounding terrain, and their narrow winding channels provide a relief to the otherwise relatively uniform terrain of the flats.

This photograph includes just a bit of the plant (which I believe is a type of saltgrass) that grows in the hostile and alien terrain at the source of the salt spring on the edge of this sun-blasted salt flat. Aside from places like Antarctica or the very highest alpine peaks, I’m hard pressed to think of other places that are less conducive to life. Yet, even here some small creatures are found in the water and these grasses somehow manage to survive. (And a short distance up the wash above the salt flat, new plants were beginning to sprout among the stones.) The grasses not only grow in very salty water, but many of them – including some at the lower left in this image – are encrusted in the dry salt.

Dealing with the extremely large difference in distance between the foreground mud, water, and plants at my feet and the distant mountain range and sky was tricky. The fact that a relatively long 50mm focal length was required for the composition I saw made it even more difficult – a shorter focal length would have given me much more depth of field. This would have been the perfect place to use a tilt/shift lens… but I don’t have one! Instead I resorted to a technique that can work very effectively when you shoot digitally, namely “focus bracketing.” Once I composed the shot I made three exposures, with each focused at a different distance from the camera. In the end it turned out that two covered it pretty well, with one focused on the mud/water/plants at my feet and the other focused on a much more distant point. In the post-processing stage in Photoshop I carefully aligned the two images (necessary since they shift with the different focus settings) and then used a mask to blend the sharpest portions of the two shots.

The jury is still out on whether this is better than using tilt/shift lenses or just a different alternative. With a tilt/shift I could have captured the scene in a single exposure that would have been sharp throughout the frame, making the post-processing technique unnecessary. However, in addition to having to carry another expensive prime lens I would have had to spend considerably more time setting up the shot… and the conditions out here were not exactly static!

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.