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

Dried Branch, Sand

April 10, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

The dry remnants of a dead plant in recently wind-blown sand dune, Death Valley National Park

I have been visiting Death Valley regularly for perhaps fifteen years, typically photographing there for nearly a week every year for the past decade, and occasionally more. On my most recent trip, from which I returned only days ago, I was thinking about a number of thing regarding my experience with the place and how it has changed. On my first visits there was, of course, the excitement and wonder of discovering a place that was essentially completely new to me. I recall that on my first trip there I got close to the Race Track without going all the way to this location. We camped not far from that playa and I imagined this place that I had heard so much about and even envisioned it in a particular location – and when I did visit a year or two later I discovered that it was quite a bit different from what I imagined, though magical in different and perhaps more powerful ways. After a few years of visiting and photographing the best known iconic sites I began to find them less interesting, and though I continued to photograph them when the opportunity arose, I focused more on expanding the areas I knew about and on looking more closely at areas I thought I knew.

As I did this, I have to confess that portions of the Death Valley experience baffled me or even put me off a bit. While I found some of the terrain to be tremendously beautiful, there were other aspects that I just couldn’t quite relate to. As a person who has spent a lot of time in forested places with flowing water – mainly the Sierra Nevada – I found some areas of this desert to be, quite honestly, boring. I drove through or past them on my way to what I thought of as the more interesting places where I could find colors outside of the range from tan to gray and where some special object or formation might create an obvious center of interest. However, from time to time I would be surprised to find in some plain, nondescript, and even boring place an experience of stillness, immense space, and deep silence that I had rarely encountered elsewhere. More and more, I began to see this as a primary attraction of this landscape – more so in many cases that the specific features of this pinnacle or that formation or the other valley.

On this recent trip, conditions conspired to make me look more closely at some of these things that I had originally overlooked. The conditions were such that if I had experienced them a few years ago I might have simply left. (In fact, that thought did cross my mind once or twice on this trip.) The spectacular light really never came, skies were cloudy, the air was hazy, it was very hot, the winds blew strongly, and there was a dust storm. During the first couple of day, with the exception of shooting the dust storm, many of the subjects I had in mind simply didn’t work out the way I planned. A bit surprisingly, without the possibility of shooting yet another beautiful golden hour sunset image of a spectacular bit of geography (though I did do some of that still) I slowed down and looked more closely at some of those “boring” places that I had passed through more quickly in the past.

This photograph was made in one of those locations. It was not far from one of those iconic locations, but it wasn’t the iconic spot at all. An hour or so before sunset I simply wandered away from the road, past vegetation and into the sand, and started looking around. In the low spots between dunes, the world beyond was out of sight and the wind was blocked, and as the light faded I encountered again that deep and powerful and timeless silence that is so hard to find almost anywhere else.

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.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

An Explosion of Geese

April 9, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An explosion of sudden motion as a flock of Ross’s geese takes to the evening sky over the Central Valley of California.

Watching the Ross’s geese from close by (in this case, using my car as a “blind”), we watch and wait for the inevitably sudden lift-off. I’ve watched and tried to figure out what advance warning there might be that this will happen, and I think I detect something in the sound of the flock or perhaps the way they behave, but I have yet to put my finger on it precisely. Sometimes there can be an obvious cause – as when a young calf romped straight through the flock during this visit – but more often there doesn’t seem to be any obvious thing that triggers it.

When it does happen, it is often an astonishingly sudden event, with thousands of the birds lifting off virtually simultaneously in a maelstrom of flapping wings and squawking cries and then circling the area a few times before (in most cases) settling back down in the same spot or one not far away. Sometime when shooting in low light, such as during the early morning or late evening or when it is foggy, I like to drop the shutter speed and “go with the blur” as I did in this photograph. A close look reveals distinctly goose-like shapes and parts – feet, beaks, wings, and occasional complete body forms – but the overall effect might evoke the fluttering wildness of their lift-off.

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

Desert Plants, Black Hill

April 8, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on desert arrow weed plants at the base of a black hill, with Death Valley Buttes receding into the hazy distance

This was very nearly the last photograph I made on my recent early April visit to Death Valley National Park. I try to go there to photograph at least once each year, and I’ve probably visited during the first week of April more often than at any other time. This tends to be a transitional season in the park, at least in my experience, and the conditions can range from cool to downright hot. On this visit it was, for the season, “downright hot” – temperatures with in at least the mid to high-nineties every day, and rose to just over 100 degrees on one day. This is not unheard of at this time of year, though it is on the high side of normal for the first week in April. This trip was a challenge for other reasons, too. On the second day I encountered a significant sand storm with accompanying winds, and the light was not exactly cooperative. On two mornings and two evenings clouds shut down the golden hour light, and there was quite a bit of general haze.

On this morning I figured I would do an hour or two of shooting before returning to camp to tear everything down and start my drive back home. I started by going up just past the turn off to Wild Rose Canyon, with the plan being to shoot some long distance photographs of sunrise light on some mountains that I have been thinking about shooting. The sunrise itself was more or less a washout – the atmosphere was so murky that I wasn’t even quite sure when the sun cleared the horizon! Eventually I did get some soft directional light from the sun, but I was finished with this subject somewhat quickly. I decided to go with a backup plan to photograph the Mesquite Dunes with a long lens. As I worked this subject I decided to head a bit further east and see if I could get anything from the backlight coming across the low hills above Salt Creek, and as I traveled that direction I passed this small black hill, where I have photographed before, and saw these backlit arrow weed plants and the more distant hills near Death Valley Buttes in the morning haze.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Cottonwood Trees, Escalante River Canyon

April 7, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Cottonwood trees, in various stages of fall color, beneath a tall sandstone cliff along the Escalante River, Utah

There is a little bit of a story behind this photograph. We had visited this canyon area almost a week earlier when we first arrived in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument area, but the results had not been quite what we had hoped. We were imagining clear and sunny skies reflecting colorful light down into canyon depths, warm temperatures, still air, and more. Instead we got partial clouds, freezing cold temperatures, and high winds! All of these factors had turned out photographic plans into an extremely difficult challenge. We made it up our canyon to about this point, but the winds were too strong and we were perhaps too cold to stick around. But I had noticed this group of trees at different stages in the transition to fall color and backed by huge boulders and a massive cliff of sandstone.

Nearly a week later we had some extra time and we decided that a second try at this location might be worthwhile. In contrast to that earlier visit, now it was warmer, sunnier, and less windy. We made it to the same portion of the canyon – and a bit further, too – and now found that photography was a lot more possible than it had been only a few days earlier. The color and light on this little scene might need some explanation. The cottonwood trees were, indeed, exhibiting color variations from yellow/gold, through golden brown, and even some still-green leaves. The light came from out of the frame to the right, where a very large and tall sandstone cliff was in full sun and reflecting warm colored light down into this shaded section of the canyon. The color of this light was very surprising. You can see a bit of what was going on by looking at the large boulder behind the trees. The surface facing my camera position appears blue, partly because it was in shadow and partly because that is close to the actual color of this rock. But if you look at the left side of this rock, where a large surface faces that sunlit cliff, it has taken on a color that is almost the same as that of the tree!

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Dried Branch, Sand

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An Explosion of Geese

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Desert Plants, Black Hill

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Cottonwood Trees, Escalante River Canyon

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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.