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.

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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.

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.

Commentary, Ideas

How I Title My Photographs, and Why

February 23, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 14 Comments

If you follow my photography you might notice that the titles I give to my photographs are not typically very “poetic,” instead tending to be relatively straightforward labels of the subjects. If a photograph is of a place I often simply refer to the location in the title, perhaps with the addition of a word or two identifying aspects such as season or time of day. If the photograph features a snow-covered tree, my title will likely be along the lines of “Snow-Covered Tree, Clouds.”

Not very creative, but I have my reasons.

Some photographers prefer to provide evocative and poetic titles for their images. To make up a few examples that sound like what I’m thinking of, you might see titles along the lines of “Endurance,” “At the Ends of the Earth,” or “Standing Against the Storm.” Another approach is to use enigmatic titles along the lines of “What She Saw,” “It Came in the Night,” “Sometimes it Gets Old,” “I Think of You When the Light Fades.” (To the best of my knowledge these are not the actual titles of anyone’s actual photographs… but you never know! If it turns out that they are real, the connections were entirely coincidental.)

I’m not generally a fan of that approach to naming photographs. I hope that the photograph may speak for itself through whatever it is and says as a photograph. If the subject and its execution as a photograph evoke thoughts of strength or beauty or wonder or something else compelling, then I prefer to let the photograph do the talking. If it doesn’t have this effect on its own, I’d rather not try to gussy it up by adding a title to compensate for what it doesn’t intrinsically “say” as a visual image.

In addition, often the photograph is not “about” anything other than the subject itself – it is simply presented as is for consideration on its own. Not every photograph of the sea has to try to explicitly be about loneliness or a distant shore or an emotional storm or calm thoughts or a long voyage, real or metaphorical – sometimes it is just a beautiful image of the sea, with all of the interesting (we hope!) visual elements of place, light, color, texture, form, and so forth. Not every photograph of an urban environment must try to suggest a story of alienation, or urbane sophistication, or people in a rush, etc. – it may just present elements of the urban scene for your consideration as imagery. You are free—encouraged, even—to make your own associations and find whatever meaning of your own you can in the image.

I suppose that I do need to qualify all of this a bit.

First, this is my point of view, and I understand and appreciate that others may feel that the title is part of the message of the photograph. In fact, there are great examples of photographs in which the title really is a significant part of what “makes the photograph work.” In some cases an ironic dissonance between the nature of the image and the title can be effective, for example.

Second, I don’t necessarily think that description of the context of the photograph is a bad thing. (I’d better not think that – or I’d have a lot of explaining to do concerning how I present photographs in this blog!) I think it is reasonable to inform viewers about the subject and say something about the circumstances of the creation of the photograph, for a bunch of reasons that I won’t enumerate here.

Third, I suppose that my bias might be traced to several sources. One may be the fact that many (but not all) of the photographers whose work I admire tend to take a similar approach. Another may be from my background in music, where a piece may simply be what it is and not have a specific non-musical meaning at all.

One more thing…

I decided a few years ago to mostly avoid using photograph titles that identify places that are best not named. Sometimes this is simply because the photograph is more about the immediate subject (those “rocks and trees”) than about the large and specific area and its identity. In other cases those “Trees and Rocks” are in a location whose character might be harmed by too many visits by too many people. If I were to name the location with too much specificity this could make me complicit in a process that accelerates the destruction of the very things that make it so precious— its quiet, peace, remoteness, and even its loneliness. In the past, when news traveled more slowly and among smaller numbers of people, naming these places had a much less dramatic effect. However, today, any mention is instantly cataloged and entered into searchable databases, cross-linked with other references, ready to be looking up and attached to full GPS coordinates and detailed directions for access. In this world I think it is better to be circumspect about such places. And, no, I’m not trying to “keep my places secret.” I’m happy for other people who deeply love and appreciate them as I do to discover them in the same ways I do… and to join me in sharing a responsibility for their protection and safety.

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: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco

Richardson Bay, Morning

February 23, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This photograph was shot from essentially the same position as the previous one, a black and white photo of the same vista, though with shorter focal length. I used a longer focal length here to try to enlarge to closer elements and leave out some of the stuff along the edges, and to minimize the amount of sky to some extent. I liked the color version of this – it was hard for me to think about giving up the nice overall blue haze, but even more to give up the was of light on some of the green grassy areas at the bottom of the frame.

There is quite a bit of stuff in this image, so let me describe what you see. At the bottom of the frame are hills above Marin City. Beyond the foreground hills you see Richardson Bay, which is an arm of San Francisco Bay near the entrance to Golden Gate. Across the bay we see the hills of the Tiburon Peninsula and beyond that looms the peak of Angel Island. In the distance and across San Francisco the buildings of downtown Oakland are visible through the low level backlit morning haze. Beyond are the East Bay Hills and the furthest peak is Mount Diablo, all the way out past Concord.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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