Category Archives: Photographs: Southern California

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Dawn Light, Panamint Range and Salt Flats

February 27, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

The first dawn light on the snow-dusted Panamint Range is reflected in shallow winter pools on the salt flats of Death Valley National Park.

This is yet another story of serendipity, I think, though it also does involve some advance work – which should please those who become uncomfortable with the idea that not every landscape photograph results from a slow and deliberate and well-planned process! ;-)

The general location of this scene is along a section of salt flat just below the Salt Creek turnoff from the main highway – it is the first area of obvious salt flats that you come to as you head south towards the Furnace Creek area. One one of my first photographic visits to Death Valley I recall stopping near this location along the road and trying to make a photograph pointing down the length of the Valley. It was not successful, but I’ve always been a bit intrigued by this location where the road has to curve around to the east to avoid this salt flat. A day or two earlier on this trip I had stopped along the road at almost this exact location during the “boring light” part of the day after shooting somewhere else. I had wandered – without any camera gear – down across the wash to a patch of brown salt grass and beyond to the edge of the salt flat. I had noticed a lot of things: the very alien nature of this landscape consisting of mud and caked salt and not much else, the surprising presence of some worms and larvae in this tremendously salty water, the fact that the water seemed to seep from beneath the wash, and the interesting shapes that the water created as it slowly spread along the edge of the salt flat.

Move ahead to this morning, the final one of this trip to Death Valley, and I was up well before first light. I had several ideas about what I might photograph, but had not made a firm decision yet since the weather was something of an unknown. I had a vague idea about heading north up the valley and photographing the first light on the hills along its western edge. I was keeping open the possibility that spectacular light might make it worth while to photograph Zabriskie. But I really didn’t know.

I drove to the Furnace Creek/Scotty’s Castle junction and pulled over to watch the light begin to grow. There were lots of clouds! It looked like a lighter area might evolve straight to my east, but I couldn’t quite see photographic potential in it. To the north things looked pretty bleak. There was some possibility that light could happen way to the south, but I wasn’t convinced. I decided to drive a bit south and see what might happen, and very soon I came back to this place where I had stopped earlier. The light wasn’t very promising – clouds to the east seemed likely to block the sunrise light even though there were some interesting cloud patterns overhead that were starting to become more transparent as the sky began to lighten.

Then I caught just a bit of light on some of the higher clouds above the middle level clouds and I started to wonder if the light just might make it through. I went to the back of the car and grabbed my camera with one lens already attached and mounted it on the tripod. I wasn’t sure if I’d want wide or tele for some of the possible subjects, so I grabbed two additional lenses and stuck them in a shoulder bag and headed down the wash, not really looking up too much, just heading straight towards these little areas of water that I remembered from earlier. As I got close to the edge of the flats I saw that, indeed, a band of sunrise light was coming in below the cloud deck to the east (something I have learned to watch for) and starting to light up the highest peaks of the Panamints. I knew that if this light survived long enough to make it down across the range that it was going to happen fast, so I quickly headed out onto the edge of the flats, more or less ignoring the larger scene and simply looking for an interesting reflecting pool. As I set up – working very quickly now – the first sun lit up the face of the panamints and revealed radiating cloud shapes above. I had perhaps two minutes of this light… and then the small gap along the eastern horizon must have closed up as the light disappeared and went back to gray.

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Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Dunes, Cottonwood Mountains, and Dust Storm

February 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

Afternoon winds whip up a dust storm over Death Valley between sand dunes and the high ridges of the Cottonwood Mountains.

Following my typical routine of “get up ridiculously early and shoot until I can’t stand it any longer, hang out during the middle of the day, and then head out for late afternoon and evening shooting,” I had been watching some interesting clouds developing far to the north of Stovepipe Wells during the day and decided that I might head up that way in the evening if they continued to hold promise. After crossing the Valley to the Scotty’s Castle road junction I could see a curtain of virga falling from those clouds to the north, so I decided to head that way.

The wind had been picking up from the south during the afternoon as another weather front approached. As I headed up along the edge of the main valley I could see that this wind was starting to pick up dust and sand from the Mesquite Dunes area near Stovepipe and from areas just north of that. I’m more familiar with the dust being carried south by winds out of the north, so this was a bit of a different site as sand/dust were being picked up from the dunes rather than being deposited there.

The dunes at the bottom of this photograph are not the familiar “main” dunes near Stovepipe, but are instead smaller dunes running north/south up the Valley. While a larger version of the photograph shows some blowing dust on these foreground dunes, the main cloud is coming from further south down the Valley. Beyond the dust and across the Valley are the hills of the Cottonwood range ascending to a ridge that still holds a bit of snow from storms over the previous couple of days, with building clouds above that would bring another dusting on this evening.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Winter Evening Sky, Panamint Range, Death Valley

February 25, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Winter clouds fill the evening sky above the eastern slopes of the Panamint Range in Death Valley National Park.

After the long drive from the San Francisco Bay Area I arrived at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley and set up my camp in the mid afternoon and hung out a bit, thinking about the prospects of late afternoon and evening shooting. Because a weather front was coming in (the forecast called for a chance of rain in the Valley and pretty much certain light snow over the passes) the clouds were increasing, in many directions heading past the point of “picturesque” and more towards “socked in.” I was hoping for some evening light – or early rain? – but it seemed less promising as evening approached. In circumstances like these I may come up with a few possible shooting alternatives ahead of time, watch as conditions develop, and make a last-minute decision about where to go based on observations and hunches.

So, late in the afternoon I stopped near Death Valley Dunes and worked to line up some long shots that filled the background of the dunes with the rugged shapes of the Grapevine Mountains, and then headed towards the junction with the road to Scotty’s Castle to try to figure out if the light held more promise to the north or the south. It didn’t look totally promising in either direction, but I thought that I might be able to make something out of the haze to the south as the ridges on both sides of the Valley receded, especially if a bit of glow in the sky turned up right at sunset. So, south it was.

I drove just a little ways in that direction to a point where the road curves a bit towards the east to travel around the northernmost area of salt flats in what I think of as the lower valley – this is the area a bit south of the Salt Creek cutoff. From here there is a fairly open view all the way down to the end of the Valley, and it looked like the clouds were going to evolve in some interesting ways. It didn’t look like I would see a gaudy, brilliantly colorful sunset, but something more subtle and quiet looked like it might happen. As the light began to fade I made a series of photographs whose subject was largely the sky and the atmospheric recession along the Panamint Range (shown here) on the west side of the Valley and the mountains just beyond Furnace Creek.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Death Valley, the Panamint Range and Zabriskie Badlands

February 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Morning light on the badlands of Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, and the Panamint Range – Death Valley National Park, California.

I just returned from a four-day shoot in Death Valley in rather “interesting” conditions for the most part. While it isn’t supposed to be as hot in Death Valley at this time of year as it will be later on, it was a bit more wintry than one might usually expect – nothing out of the realm of the ordinary, but in many ways closer to one of the sharp points at the end of the bell curve. On the first two nights it snowed in the peaks around the valley, perhaps down to 4000′ of elevation or even a bit lower. And it was cold even during the day when I drove up into the surrounding ranges – I experienced quite a bit of weather in the low thirties and drove through some light snow on several occasions.

The weather is part of the story behind this photograph, and it is also one of several I made on this trip that reminded me how important serendipity is in landscape photography. I don’t mean to imply that planning doesn’t matter, or that if you just make enough photographs that eventually you’ll get lucky. What I mean is that there are so many variables at work in the living landscape that a photographer would have to be semi-deluded to think that we can actually be successful purely on the basis of careful planning. (OK, I’ll accept the notion of “preparing for serendipity.”) As prepared as we can be, once “out there” in the landscape there are so many unpredictable and uncontrollable elements that an important part of what we do, I think, is to take advantage of fleeting opportunities before they pass – a combination of being aware of them when they occur, being technically and otherwise ready to work with them, and then acting quickly and relatively intuitively.

The story on this morning is roughly as follows. I woke up well before dawn with a general plan of taking a look at what I could see of the weather in complete darkness and then picking from one of several morning possibilities that I had thought about then night before. I got up and drove a ways to where I had a broad view of the Valley in both the north and south direction and tried to figure out what might happen. It was quite cloudy – it had rained and snowed a bit overnight and the precipitation wasn’t over with yet. It look a little lighter to the south, so I thought that I’d see what was happening up at Dantes View, where a grand vista of Death Valley is available in clear weather. I had this image of a dusting of snow on the peak as the sun broke through the clouds at dawn to reveal panoramic views.

Reality didn’t quite cooperate. I drove out on the road to Dantes View and it wasn’t getting any clearer. In fact, the peaks were still quite socked in. As I got closer it began to snow, and before long it was cold enough that the snow on the road was sticking. I soon arrived at the last section of the climb, which claims to feature 15% grades, and thought better of driving up this slick road… in falling snow… and into thick clouds. The odds of sunrise light were essentially zero. So I turned around with a vague idea of heading down the way I had come until I found some light. A couple miles down things cleared enough that I could get some shots of distant snow covered ridges in morning light, and a bit further on I was able to make a stitched panorama of the Valley.

I kept going. I had vowed that I would not go near Zabriskie Point on this trip unless something really interesting or unusual happened, but I stopped in the parking lot when I reached it just to take a look around. It was past the standard and popular dawn light period (not that there had been any!) and most photographers were leaving as I arrived. But I’ve shot here before enough to know that sometimes interesting stuff happens later, and I thought that the cloud shadows on the Panamints across the Valley looked like they were starting to thin. I wanted to photograph one particular wash on the Panamints, but it was obscured by intervening hills so I wandered a bit to the north looking for a better view of the spot. I finally found it and had a long lens focused on a tight shot of this area when all of a sudden shafts of light came through the clouds and lit up the folds in the gully right below me just as the first light was hitting the flats on the far side of the Valley. I quickly moved to a shorter focal length and recomposed to include this gully, and made this photograph in the minute or so of this light.

If I claimed that this is the shot I planned to produce when I started out early on this morning… I would be lying.

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