Tag Archives: 20

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

Wash and Eroded Hills

April 22, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light shines on eroded hills and a desert wash.

This was the final morning of my spring photographic excursion to Death Valley. On the last day of these visits I always seem to follow the same general ritual — I get up well before dawn (of course!) and visit one final photography location very early, then go back and break camp before leaving the park and starting the long drove back to the San Francisco Bay Area. This means that I almost always pick a familiar “sure thing” location for the last morning, and one that is not too far from wherever I camped the night before. I rarely make this a spur-of-the-moment decision, instead typically deciding ahead of time where I’ll go — there isn’t a lot of time to waste on this final, long day. On this trip I headed back to a little area not far from a familiar Death Valley icon. (I would stop at that icon, but only if the conditions turned out to be spectacularly unusual — I certainly don’t need another photograph of it otherwise, as beautiful as it is.)

I turned off the main road onto the gravel side road, slowed to a crawl, parked and got out with camera gear in hand, and quickly settled into the quiet and stillness of this place in the moments before dawn. Even though I have been to this spot many times, I’m still surprised by how quiet it is and by how few others go here. Although I know specific locations that might offer reliable and predictable photographs, once I’m here I prefer to take my time and look for and at things that I had not previously noticed. At first — and it was the case on this morning — it seems like there is little special to see, and I may momentarily wonder if I’m going to be able to find photographs. But as I slow down and begin to see, I invariably find things that I would have missed if I had not given the place some time. This photograph was the result of spotting a little path up to a higher spot — the path itself intrigued me so I followed it, and I was happy to find that it overlooked this little bit of classic Death Valley geography.

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

Rising Desert Hills

December 31, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A rising series of colorful eroded hills, Death Valley National Park

I get to use this photograph to tell a story at my own expense. Before arriving in Death Valley I had previous shot a very different subject. I don’t recall if it was birds in fading dusk light or perhaps classical musicians in stage lighting and backstage work lights. (Some of you can already guess where this is headed…) On the first morning in Death Valley I headed to a place that I like to photograph in early light – a place where there usually aren’t too many people, despite the easily accessible location, and where the eroded and colorful geology is almost completely devoid of plants. I arrived before sunrise and soon found a nice composition that I had not photographed before. I spent some time working that scene before moving on and photographing another a little ways away. Partway through that second set of shots I realized that my camera was still on the settings for the prior low-light subject – namely ISO 3200. That is not exactly a typical landscape sort of setting, and while good results are possible when shooting low light subjects that way, the noise levels are far from ideal for landscape. I reset and continued shooting. (I did return to the location on the final morning of the trip to reshoot that first subject.)

This scene was one of the first that I shot after realizing my error. These very eroded hills place different color material in a series of rising hills – tan, reddish, purple-black, brown, and more. The smooth features along the tops of some of the small ridges contrast with the very sharp and angular lines of the eroded channels that lead down to the wash. Later in the day the light here is almost impossibly harsh and the colors fade, but for a few minutes at the start (especially) and end of the day the colors briefly intensify.

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

Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon

November 7, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A dry wash descends past the barren hills of Twenty Mule Team Canyon in morning shadows, Death Valley National Park.

I made this photograph on an early morning in early April a couple of years ago. I had gone to Death Valley National Park’s Twenty Mule Team Canyon to photograph some folded and eroded patterns in the upper portion of this valley, and a bit after sunrise I noticed a trail heading up a side canyon. I decided to follow it. It started out by ascending the wash shown in the photograph and eventually reached a low saddle along the eroded ridge of between this canyon and the descent to Death Valley itself. When I arrived there, as sometimes happens in Death Valley, I discovered an old vehicle track heading down into the canyon on the other side.

Since I had some other plans for a bit later in the morning, and because I didn’t see anything immediately exciting on the other side of this ridge as the route descended, I instead backtracked into this wash. As my trail crossed the broad area across from this line of hills I looked back toward the main valley and saw this sunlit s-curve in front of the somewhat shaded ridge.

Related: See my extensive posts on Photographing Death Valley

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

Eroded Gullies at Zabriskie Point, Morning

September 1, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Low angle morning light illuminates a tortured landscape of eroded gullies at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park.

I recently “rediscovered” this photograph while undertaking a major review of the past eight years of my raw files. (And, yes, that task is just about as much fun as you might imagine. It would actually be pretty unbearable except that every so often I find some photographs that I had perhaps forgotten or overlooked, and I also come across images that remind me of experiences that took place some time ago.)

This photograph was made, as virtually anyone who has visited the spot recognizes, by pointing my camera about 90 degrees to the left of the classic Zabriskie Point views. Timing was important, as the early light is just skimming across the tops of these tortuously eroded gullies, picking out the ridges between them but leaving the lower sections in shadow. But good fortune also played a role here. Death Valley is usually a clear blue sky kind of place, but on this morning I had clouds! At dawn, if I recall correctly, the clouds actually interfered with the light a bit. But as the sun rose the clouds provided a more dramatic background than plain blue sky and created some softer and diffused light that gave just the right sort of dynamic range for photographs.

On a technical note, if you are viewing this in the right web browser you can mouse over the image and see a summary of basic EXIF data. (Sorry, but this feature only works in web browsers – if you are viewing email, etc. you’ll need to visit the version at my blog to see the EXIF.) If you do check the EXIF you might notice that this photograph was made with a very humble example of photographic technology, the Canon Digital Rebel XT. This camera is a 8MP cropped sensor “consumer” camera that I acquired when I first tested the waters of DSLR photography. (I had actually used digital cameras back in the 1990s, but not for serious photographic work.) Those who wonder which of today’s current DSLRs might enable them to produce interesting and effective images might consider what could be done with such a humble camera. ;-)

(Basic EXIF data may be available by “mousing over” large images in posts. Leave a comment if you want to know more.)

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: 20

Wash and Eroded Hills

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Rising Desert Hills

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Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon

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Eroded Gullies at Zabriskie Point, Morning

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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.