Death Valley Buttes, Morning. Death Valley National Park, California. January 3, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early morning light on the summit of the Death Valley Buttes, with the Panamint Range in the distance, Death Valley National Park, California.

I found several things in this scene that I often look for in Death Valley, or in other similar places for that matter. I’m always intrigued by the small plants that grow along these very barren and rocky areas, sometimes – as here – along with a few cacti. And of course it is hard to resist the golden early morning light, especially when it is juxtaposed with one of my favorite subjects, more distant mountains somewhat obscured by haze. On top of that, I liked the almost abstract shapes of these forms and combination of the warm sunlight on the foreground hills and the cooler, blue-tone light beyond.

I made this photograph on a morning when I really did not have a specific shooting plan, or perhaps I might say that I had a “negative plan” defining what I was not going to photograph – I set out to not go to some of the familiar and more iconic locations in Death Valley, on this morning and to some extent on this trip. So I ended up on a road that eventually crosses the Amargosa Range and heads off toward Beatty Nevada. I knew I was looking for some sort of juxtaposition of the forms on the outcroppings and buttes up higher on the large gravel fan in this part of the Valley and I knew that I wanted to photograph the early light – but exactly where to do this was not clear. As I drove I passed some promising locations and finally stopped at a pull-out near this site, put on a long lens, and made this and several other photographs from this spot.

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.