Tag Archives: dusk

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

Eureka Valley Dunes, Dusk

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Eureka Valley Dunes, Dusk - Pink dusk light on the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Park.
Pink dusk light on the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Park.

Eureka Valley Dunes, Dusk. Death Valley National Park, California. January 5, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Pink dusk light on the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Park.

On the second-to-last day of my January visit to Death Valley, I decided that it would make sense to exit the park to the north by way of miles of gravel roads heading into the northern portion of the park then out via more gravel and then some paved roads to Big Pine the next day, setting me up to return home over snow-free (in January!) Tioga Pass. After shooting early in the morning I headed back to my camp – at Stovepipe Wells at that time – had some breakfast, took down my camp, and packed. By the time I fueled up my car and headed north, I was a bit behind my planned schedule, but I figured that I might still make it to Eureka Valley in time to shoot in some late afternoon light.

A few hours later, after a drive including over 40 miles of gravel, I finally arrived at the site of these monumental dunes. At nearly 700 feet tall, they are supposedly the tallest dunes in the United States – or is it in North America? Eureka Vally is a lonely place, being a long drive on rough roads from any direction and almost completely without the civilized services found in some other areas of the park. When I got there, a family that had visited was just leaving, and there was one other photographer shooting high up on the dunes. I knew that I didn’t have enough time to try that, so I grabbed my gear and hiked over to one side of the dunes where their lower slopes begin to merge with the flat surface of the valley and where the last sun would hit the dunes. I shot there for a while and after the sun dropped below the ridges to the west I went looking for subjects that might benefit from the post-sunset soft and pink light. Very close to my “campsite” (which was in the back of my vehicle that night!) I saw these plants leading up toward the summit of the dunes and the higher stratified peaks beyond, and I made a few photographs in the rose-colored late light.

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

Kit Fox Hills and Death Valley Buttes, Dusk

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Kit Fox Hills and Death Valley Buttes, Dusk - Post-sunset light on the Kit Fox Hills, Death Valley Buttes, and the slopes of the Grapevine Mountains, Death Valley National Park
Post-sunset light on the Kit Fox Hills, Death Valley Buttes, and the slopes of the Grapevine Mountains, Death Valley National Park

Kit Fox Hills and Death Valley Buttes, Dusk. Death Valley National Park, California. January 3, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Post-sunset light on the Kit Fox Hills, Death Valley Buttes, and the slopes of the Grapevine Mountains, Death Valley National Park.

The view of the eroded Kit Fox Hills and the larger masses of Death Valley Buttes beyond with ascending ridges and valleys of the Amargosa Range beyond is one that I’ve been working on for a few years now. During the day these formations are interesting, but in many ways not much more so than any of scores of other hills, washes, rocky ridges and so forth throughout the park and other desert areas. But sometimes the light does absolutely incredible things to these hills along the east side of the Valley.

I first saw this happen during a previous visit when evening clouds lit up in astonishing and almost surreal ways after the sun had set. As the sky to the west of Death Valley began to glow in the post-sunset light a wash of amazing and intense color began to fill the scene. I’m not even sure how to describe the color. Rose? Purple? Pink? Some combination of the three and more? At that time I was shooting from a small hill in a less visited portion of the Valley, and I I photographed a large “fan” along the base of huge mountains not far from Stovepipe Wells. While the colors in that photograph are, indeed, real, I have a heck of a time convincing people that this is the case. I end up doing so much explaining that I don’t show the photograph all that often!

This light is similar, though a bit less intense. The light was fading quickly at this point, and I only had a few moments of this particularly beautiful light, which might have been hard to see in person since it was getting late. I photographed this from yet another spot that it just a bit off the beaten track, though not far at all from some very popular areas. In fact, as I worked alone as the evening came on, I could swing my camera around and use my longest focal length to see hordes of people visiting and photographing another nearby feature, oblivious to the light in this spot far to their east.

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

Badwater Salt Flats, Evening

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Badwater Salt Flats, Evening
Badwater Salt Flats, Evening

Badwater Salt Flats, Evening. Death Valley National Park, California. March 31, 2009. © Copyright 2009 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of rough patterns in the dried salt desert floor at Badwater Salt Flats, Death Valley National Park.

This is another of the “rediscovered photographs” that I uncovered while reviewing many years of raw files recently. Periodically I go through all of the old archived raw files, partly to cull out a few that I know that I’ll never use, but also because I know that whenever I revisit the old files I discover some photographs that I had forgotten or had never understood at the time I made them. Revisiting the old file archives, I’m sometimes shocked that I passed over certain images.

This one is from the salt flats at Badwater in Death Valley National Park. Technically, this was not shot at precisely “Badwater,” but it is close enough. I was out on the flats in the late afternoon, shooting as the sun dropped behind the Panamint Range. In my view, the best light – with the exception of days when clouds might tower above the Panamints – comes starting right about at the time that the sun passes the line of the ridge as it descends at the end of the day. This takes the incredibly bright and harsh sun off of the playa and provides softer light in the shadow of the range. However, this also presents a problem that almost everyone who has shot here must understand, namely that the illumination by the bright blue sky turns the “white” salt a surprisingly intense blue color. I’ve seen people handle this in a variety of ways: keep the intense, almost gaudy, blue color; do a lot of color correction to get colors that more closely correspond to what we recall seeing; mostly include the sky with its more intense colors; or let the colors go and do a black and white rendition.

Although I’ve “done” this subject in color a number of times, somehow this one seemed to call out for black and white. For one thing, it allowed me to use the interesting shapes of the evening clouds as a dramatic backdrop to the rough and broken shapes of the playa salt polygons. It also allowed me to try an interpretation that focuses on the dramatic potential of the scene.

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.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon

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Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon
Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon

Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon. Yosemite National Park, California. September 19, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Afternoon storm clouds clear from the sunset sky above Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon, Yosemite National Park.

With this photograph I get to tell another of the “serendipitous photograph” stories that seem to keep coming up in my work. In this case, we had been camped near the lake in the lower area of the photograph for several days, getting to know the place and having time to carefully photograph various areas nearby. On a previous evening we had climbed to a second lake a few hundred feet higher than the “main” lake, from which one of our group decided to traverse a nearby slope. He ended up at another alpine lake that looked interesting, and the next morning others went with him to visit it. I didn’t, because I had some other things that I wanted to photograph in morning light and because I had a hunch that the light might turn out to be more interesting in the evening, mainly because the area of the lake was open to the west and, therefore, the evening light.

So in the evening, after our typical very early dinner, I departed on a walk to the upper lake that my friends had visited that morning, wandering around “our” lake and through the surrounding forest to pick up a rocky ramp that ascended toward the lake. However, I apparently missed a turn somewhere. I finished the main part of the climb and apparently should have turned left immediately – but I continued on straight ahead and soon found myself in a little meadowy area with a rather steep bunch of rocks between me and my goal. I finally found a circuitous route up a series of ramps, but now it was getting too close to sunset and my turn-around time, so I had to retrace my steps without getting to the lake.

I returned to the small meadow and made a few photographs there, then headed back toward the route by which I had ascended. Despite not making the lake, one of my main goals had been to get up high to photograph the surrounding terrain at sunset, especially since earlier in the day large thunderclouds had been building to the east and creating the possibility of some very special evening light. As I descended the upper part of the “ramp,” the pre-sunset colors started to light up and I quickly found a spot with a good vantage point to view this in several directions. Among the last photographs I made as the light started to fade was the series including this image. (It is actually a composite of two exposures – one for the very bright and saturated clouds and another for the darker shadows down near that lake.) Beyond the lake is the left end of rocky Shepherds Crest and even further in the distance is Virginia Canyon and then the Sierra crest.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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