Tag Archives: distance

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Basin and Range

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Basin and Range
A long distance view across Death Valley and to distant mountains beyond

Basin and Range. Death Valley National Park, California. March 28, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A long distance view across Death Valley and to distant mountains beyond

The landscape of Death Valley National Park is immense. The fact that it is the largest national park in the lower 48 states begins to penetrate my awareness the more time I spend there. A number of years ago I spent some time on a very long cycling trip in Alaska and the Yukon, and this desert landscape comes closer than any other I have experienced to evoking the same sense of huge distances and deep stillness and quiet. This landscape extends even further beyond the boundaries of the park, from the Sierra Nevada to the west to distant peaks of the basin and range country to the east.

This high elevation location opens to such a huge swath of terrain that it is difficult to get your mind around the scale of what you are seeing. For example, there is a road out there in the large valley. To get there from the place where my tripod was set up would take me hours of driving — and that would take me perhaps less than half way toward the most distant peaks. Enhancing the other-worldly quality of this morning was the unusual atmosphere. The clouds of a weather front were breaking up over the mountains and valleys, and their shadows were moving across the landscape. Meanwhile, in another valley far behind me, dust storm conditions (which would envelope this entire scene by the end of the day) were beginning to pick up, and already the atmosphere was getting that milky, hazy quality that precedes such weather. At the bottom of the scene is an immense gravel fan that has carried material down from these mountains, filling the valley in places to thousands of feet of depth.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Juniper, Red Rock, La Sal Mountains

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Juniper, Red Rock, La Sal Mountains - A Utah juniper growing on red rock with the La Sal Mountains in the distance, Grand View overlook, Canyonlands National Park
A Utah juniper growing on red rock with the La Sal Mountains in the distance, Grand View overlook, Canyonlands National Park

Juniper, Red Rock, La Sal Mountains. Canyonlands National Park, Utah. October 10, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A Utah juniper growing on red rock with the La Sal Mountains in the distance, Grand View overlook, Canyonlands National Park.

We had a great visit to Canyonlands National Park, though the lighting was challenging, to say the least. Our visit took us up to the “island in the sky” highlands and included a stop at the Dead Horse Point State Park. Initially, the light challenges were simply from the midday light and the fact that there was a certain amount of haze in the air. The haze can be a nice effect in some cases, but it can also obscure some of the longer views such as those from this high plateau. As the day wore on, clouds began to collect to the west and, as luck would have it, the thickest portion of the clouds were almost directly west of us. Ultimately, this interfered with my chances for dusk shooting, but sometimes that’s just the way it goes.

Before heading to the golden hour light location that I had selected, we drove down to the “Grand View” overlook – appropriately named, as anyone who has been there can confirm. Here the high plateau ends suddenly with a steep thousand foot drop off to the next lower level of strata and the Green River joins the Colorado in the vast and rugged terrain to the south. I did eventually make some photographs of that subject – it is sort of obligatory! However, as I walked to the overlook I saw to my left this chunk of cliff-edge sandstone with its resident juniper and remembered looking at it the last time I was there. The soft light produced by the overcast was a Good Thing here, as full sun would have produced a very harsh effect on the rocks. Beyond lies the giant valley of the Colorado River and even further out are the high and distant peaks of the La Sal mountains.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley

Three Towers, Morning

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Three Towers, Morning - Three tufa towers in morning light, surrounded by wind-blown patterns on the surface of Mono Lake, California.
Three tufa towers in morning light, surrounded by wind-blown patterns on the surface of Mono Lake, California.

Three Towers, Morning. Mono Lake, California. July 14, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Three tufa towers in morning light, surrounded by wind-blown patterns on the surface of Mono Lake, California.

In mid-July I was in the Tuolumne/Tioga Pass area of the Sierra for a few days of photograph. In the end, I decided to stay over one extra night so that I could drive down to photograph around Mono Lake early in the morning before heading home. I was up before dawn, quickly in my car, and down to the shoreline of Mono Lake before sunrise. My first objective was to try to photograph sand tufa formations – not the more famous tufa towers. I found what I was looking for, and spend the sunrise period photographing them in first light. However, this opportunity quickly ended, so I turned my attention to the lake itself, along with its surroundings of low hills.

While the tufa towers are the iconic visual symbols of Mono Lake, I have some other and perhaps strong associations with the place. Most of them are connected to a time of day, early morning, when I most often visit. They involve near silence, broken only by the sounds of the many gulls and other birds that are found in and around the lake. In my memories, the air is still, and it is warm, the warm of early an early desert morning that holds the smell of sage and dust. And while the moment of sunrise is what I often go there to find, in the end it is the light that comes a bit later that sticks most in my mind. This light is bright – almost too bright to look into if the lake is hazy – and it is blue with distance. This is the light that I saw on this morning, with a bit of very light breeze forming slight patterns on the surface of the lake near three isolated tufa towers.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Rock Garden, Atmospheric Haze, Morning

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Rock Garden, Atmospheric Haze, Morning - Black and white photograph of a rock garden of sandstone towers in morning light, backed by atmospheric haze and barely visible La Salle Mountains, Arches National Park
Black and white photograph of a rock garden of sandstone towers in morning light, backed by atmospheric haze and barely visible La Salle Mountains, Arches National Park

Rock Garden, Atmospheric Haze, Morning. Arches National Park, Utah. April 7, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of a rock garden of sandstone towers in morning light, backed by atmospheric haze and barely visible La Salle Mountains, Arches National Park.

So far, each time I’ve thought I was hitting the end of the photographs from my early April weeklong trip to Utah, I come up with another one… and another… and another. I still have a few more waiting to be posted, but those are photographs that I had already worked up but held off posting for one reason or another. This one, however, may be the final one to actually emerge from the collection of exposures from the trip. (But I make no promises! There is one more that features some reflected light inside alcoves in sandstone that still may work.)

This photographed ended up in black and white for several reasons. I was sort of leaning that direction when I made the exposure, since the color components of the scene were both difficult to work with and a bit less than exciting. In addition, I like the way that black and white can sometimes abstract the shapes of things, perhaps taking them a few degrees further from their “real” nature. I had stopped alongside the road between the Windows Area and Wall Street as I begin my exit from Arches National Park on my last morning of shooting there. There was a lot of haze, especially when looking into the light, as this photograph does. The backlit haze is thick enough that the snow- and forest-covered La Salle Mountains, which actually fill the upper part of the frame, all almost impossible to see, and the foreground features gradually lose contrast as they progress away from the camera. However, because the light is in front of the camera and coming from just out of the right side of the frame, the edges of the rock towers gain a bit of extra definition against that hazy background.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.