Tag Archives: encrusted

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

Edge of the Salt Flats

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Edge of the Salt Flats, Death Valley
“Edge of the Salt Flats” — Saltgrass grows around a winding, salt-encrusted desert gully at the edge of Death Valley salt flats.

This was almost the last photograph I made on this early morning shoot at the Death Valley salt flats. I had gone to a spot I had picked earlier, arriving in the pre-dawn darkness and hiking out across a shallow alluvial fan to reach the salt flats before sunrise. I had a couple of compositions in mind, and I wanted to start working with them as the very first light touched the peaks across the valley.

I began that work and continued as the light worked its way down the face of the desert mountains and finally arrived on the flats. Suddenly the sun topped a ridge to my east and the light became harsher and brighter… and I was done with my subject. I started back to my vehicle, and as I followed a shallow wash through the salty terrain next to the flats, I looked back and saw this little salt-lined waterway at the end of the playa in the morning light

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

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

Plants and Fractured Granite

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Plants and Fractured Granite
Plants and Fractured Granite

Plants and Fractured Granite. Yosemite National Park, California. September 15, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Various rain-moistened plants growing in a fracture in lichen-encrusted glacial granite slabs, Yosemite National Park.

This photograph was made in almost exactly the same spot as the photograph I posted yesterday, in an area of water-stained granite along the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park. Not only was I fortunate to have soft light, but it was cloudy and it had been raining lightly just before we went out to shoot. You can’t ask for much better conditions for such a subject: soft light from the clouds, colors saturated by the moisture, and a few small drops of rain still on the leaves of the plants. (The latter may not quite be visible in this little jpg image.)

I’m always on the lookout for this little intimate landscapes, especially if they include Sierra granite. I had been wandering around this area trying to find ways to make compositions out of the reddish and rain-moistened rock, shooting trees and small plants and even a few isolated rocks. This plant was growing out of a narrow crack and hanging downward, its green contrasting with the reddish-brown color of the rocks . The arrangement of the nearly vertical crack, the diagonal boundaries between the red rock and the gray rock, and the mottled texture of the lichen also caught my eye.

When I share a photograph like this one, I’m reminded of my friend Mike, a retired Yosemite ranger, who pointedly reminded me once that sometimes there really is no good reason to name the precise location of such a scene. The location is irrelevant to the photograph, similar little scenes are repeated thousands of times over throughout the Sierra, and it isn’t really about the specific place at all.

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.