Creosote plant in sunlight, backed by shadowed sand dunes.
Sand dune landscapes provide all sorts of surprises. After seeing many photographs of impressive blowing sand and dust storms, you might think that is the norm — but most of the time the dunes are quiet and still. In the daytime there often doesn’t seem to be a lot going on in a visual sense. But go there at the earliest and latest moments of the day, and the light changes so quickly that it is almost impossible to keep up. Here there was only a brief moment when the soft light fell on the dune and the creosote plant and left the further dunes in soft, cool-toned light.
It is common to think of landscape photography as a slow and deliberate process. In fact, at times and with certain subjects it can be, and the photographer may have a lot of time to look and contemplate. But in this edge-of-day light things happen so quickly that photography can become a kind of action sport. The light does something “over there” for a brief moment, but when I look up something new is happening elsewhere. I turn my attention, quickly make a photograph or two, and right away some new combination of form and light emerges. And this whole dynamic show itself only lasts for a short time between midday bright (and often harsh) light and darkness.
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Sand patterns on the side of a sand dune following a wind storm
Like so many such places, Death Valley is a place of big, solid landscapes — but it is also a place of small and incredibly fleeting things. The landscape is constantly being reshaped and moved by wind and sometimes by water, and while the large-scale features change very slowly, the smaller features often are so transitory that they are gone almost as soon as they appear.
The sand dunes are, no surprise, one of the places of constant change. While the dunes, perhaps surprisingly, manage to maintain their general form over long periods of time, a closer look reveals things that change from day to day and even from moment to moment. During this visit to Death Valley I experienced several days of high winds and conditions that were often quite dusty, with dust storms in play for more than 24 hours. I ventured out onto these dunes near the end of a day that had begun with strong winds and blowing sand, and the conditions had only calmed down shortly before I walked out here. The patterns are on the lee side of a dune, where sand blown to the top of the dune on other side falls over the edge and out of the wind, forming intricate and intertwining patterns. For just a very brief moment in the evening the waning sunlight angled almost directly across the surface of these shapes, and moments after I made this exposure the light was gone.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
A clump of creosote brush casts a morning shadow across tracks in the sand, Mesquite Dunes, Death Valley National Park
While reviewing some old raw files near the end of 2012, I went back to some Death Valley photographs made during the past few years. I came upon this photograph that I had more or less forgotten. I wonder if at the time I was distracted by other photographs that appealed to me more, or if I perhaps just wasn’t sure how to treat it at the time. In any case, it still surprises me – even though I should know better by now – that I find photographs that I like among images that I thought I had finished with several years ago!
Looking through the other photographs that were part of the series that this one comes from, I recalled that I had gone out into dunes in Death Valley before dawn to photograph pre-dawn, dawn, and early morning conditions. As I often do, I approached these dunes by a roundabout route, not only to make the walk a bit easier but also to avoid other photographers and to have a better chance of finding sand that had not yet been tracked up by other human visitors. This small clump of creosote was growing in shallow sand, and its roots had slowed the windblown sand enough to create a very small hill. In turn, this let the low angle sun cast a shadow that led downhill into lower sand and which crossed the tracks of some wildlife that had passed this way the night before.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
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.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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
