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

Sandstorm, Dunes, Desert Mountains

April 29, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early evening light on sand dunes with clouds of wind-driven dust above and desert mountains beyond, Death Valley National Park

As it got closer to sunset on this sandstorm evening in Death Valley, I stopped at a low, black hill that I like to ascend so that I can shoot in a 360 degree panorama from its summit. The hill itself is interesting, it that it is made up of material that is much different from that of the surrounding desert, a sort of very dark layered rock. The hill itself is almost completely bare of vegetation, but the flats around it support a healthy crop of arrow weed plants, which can glow with a golden color in the right light.

While my original plan was to photograph the further dunes, from here I saw the conjunction of the golden arrow weed plants, the dark curve of the barren black hill, the bright light and shadows on the taller dunes, the clouds of blowing sand beyond the dunes, and in the far distance the lower peaks and ridges of the Cottonwood Mountains. This is an example of an opportunistic photograph, in that I did not plan on this scene beforehand and because the light died within a minute or two of the time I arrived.

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

Desert Mountains, Pre-Dawn Haze

April 28, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Desert mountain ridges in pre-dawn “blue hour” light rise above Death Valley and recede to highest peaks in the distance

On this April 2013 visit to Death Valley I encountered some very challenging light situations. What you hope for on an early morning like this is beautiful, colorful dawn light, perhaps preceded by a warm pre-dawn glow and followed by bright morning light. But when it came to beautiful early morning light – and evening light, too – I got precious little of it this time. On two mornings a thin overcast and atmospheric haze pretty much killed the dawn light. On one other morning I got some light, but still had to deal with the haze. The clouds were with me on a couple of the evenings, too. I have sort of learned to pretty much go with this flow and accept that difficult light as the balance in the universe that gave me, and will give me again, astonishingly beautiful light.

However, even in such light I try to see what I can find to shoot, and sometimes it provokes me to see things that I might otherwise have overlooked completely. On this morning I was up well before dawn and I headed off to a specific location that I had scouted earlier. I had two possible sorts of photographs in mind for this spot. One involved the view back down and across the main valley, and the other was planned around the arrival of first light on these rugged and stratified hills along the west side of the valley. I got to my spot, was relieved to find that the air was fairly still, and I settled in to wait for the dawn… which never quite came. It was so murky and the light was blocked by so many clouds to the east that I wasn’t even really quite certain when dawn occurred. Things got lighter… but remained hazy. I made this photograph at a moment when, on a clearer morning, these hills might have begun to assume a warm colored glow from light in the eastern sky. But this time it was all blue. The hazy sky was blue, and the mountains were as well. Since the conditions were somewhat unusual, I went ahead and made some exposures. When I first looked at the results I wasn’t very thrilled. But as I looked at them more, especially at very large sizes, I began to appreciate the softer and lower-contrast lighting and the way that details in the formations of the mountains actually become quite visible.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Calero Oaks, Fog

April 27, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Winter morning fog drifts among ridgetop oak trees, Calero County Park, California

This is an older photograph that I sort of “rediscovered” while going through older files recently. It was due for a bit of additional work, reformatting to fit my current preferred 4:3 print ratio, and the updated web border and text that you see in the online versions of my photographs. (And, to answer the question that comes up from time to time, my fine art prints do not include the text found in the online photographs!)

Although I no longer visit there quite as often, this area became a favorite location of mine a few years ago, especially during the winter months when morning fog frequently burns off and reveals the newly-green winter landscape of the California grassland and oak forests. The photograph was made on one of these very mornings, as I had hiked the familiar trail along the top of this ridge, to find myself on the border between fog in the valleys and clearing on the ridge, with the edge of the fog drifting through these trees and the sun backlighting this misty atmosphere.

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

Dunes and Sandstorm

April 26, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Towering clouds of wind-blown sand rise above desert sand dunes, Death Valley National Park

In the early afternoon, a bit to my surprise and somewhat to my consternation, after returning to camp from shooting in another area of the park I got my first hints of the upcoming afternoon and evening sand storm when I noticed an increasing number of dust devils out by the dunes and when blowing dust began to rise along the far eastern side of the Valley. Although these events can be photogenic (and a bit dangerous to camera gear!) they are not very pleasant to be in, a fact that I know from previous experience. However, given that the weather otherwise had been pretty boring – too much blue sky! – at least this promised something a bit out of the ordinary.

So as the afternoon wore on I headed out, driving toward the eastern side of the Valley. As I passed this classic view of what is probably the most famous set of dunes in the Valley, large and thick dust clouds were rising behind the dunes. Oddly, there wasn’t all that much sand blowing on these dunes – just behind them on lower dunes farther north and east. So I paused to use the long lens to isolate the dunes, with their sparse plants, in the afternoon light with clouds of blowing sand mostly obscuring the peaks of the Grapevine Mountains in the Amargosa Range.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Sandstorm, Dunes, Desert Mountains

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Desert Mountains, Pre-Dawn Haze

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Calero Oaks, Fog

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

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