Tag Archives: hill

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

Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point

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Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point
Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point

Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. April 2, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning clouds fill the sky above the Manifold at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park.

I posted a monochrome version of this photograph yesterday, so there is perhaps a bit less to say about it in this post. To recap briefly, this is a photograph I made over three years ago during a spring visit to Death Valley NPS. This was a bit of a different morning for photographing at Zabriskie Point, if I recall correctly. Usually, photographing here is pretty straightforward – and once you’ve shot it a couple times in “normal” conditions, there is a basic pattern to the progression of light that becomes fairly (though perhaps not totally) clear. Normal conditions here basically mean perfectly clear skies with the sun coming up to the left from the perspective of this photograph or behind in some of the other familiar shots that include Manley Beacon – and light that sequentially illuminates subjects beginning with the highest peaks of the Panamint Range across the Valley and gradually working down into the Valley and finally to the rugged shapes at Zabriskie Point itself.

But clouds can change everything. If I am going to shoot at Zabriskie, I watch for conditions that will bring them. I will generally not stop there if it is “another beautiful clear sunrise” at Zabriskie. (If you haven’t been there before, you should stop and take in this stunning scene, but I’m often looking for something a bit different.) While the results in clear conditions are relatively predictable, they are not at all as predictable when there are clouds. You can end up with something very special… or with a drab, flat, and gray scene. But that’s the thing about special conditions – they wouldn’t be special if they were predictable and frequent!

Thinking back to this morning, my recollection is that it may have been one of those when I arrived to think, “Oh, boy, clouds!” – only to think a bit later, “I wish those clouds would move and give me some light!” I recall some bits of dawn light that were mostly blocked by the clouds. But the very clouds that blocked the hoped-for first dawn light thoughtfully assembled themselves into these impressive forms just a bit later, at right about the time that the warm side-light was getting down into the rugged folds of the Manifold and Gower Wash.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point

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Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point
Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point

Morning Clouds Above the Manifold, Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. April 2, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning clouds fill the sky above the Manifold at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Recently I’ve been going over some of my Death Valley photographs, and as I do so I discover a few that “missed the cut” the first time around but which I kind of like now when I see them a few years later. This photograph was made in 2007, on a spring morning when beautiful clouds filled the sky above Zabriskie Point and Death Valley. I have versions of this photograph in both black and white and color – I like both, though the effect is quite different. (I’ll post the color version as soon as tomorrow.)

I’ve referred to the striking central feature of the “badlands” above Gower Wash – the hill with the curving gullies and the darker material along the top – as “the Manifold” for a few years. I know I saw this label applied to the feature somewhere, but I cannot find the source now. In any case, it seems deserving of its own name, and “the Manifold” works for me.

One more observation… I have written elsewhere about my attitude toward photographing iconic scenes – an Zabriskie Point is certainly iconic! It is a bit of a long, complicated story, but this photograph illustrates part of my philosophy. I will not always bother to stop and photograph such a site, having seen many beautiful mornings (and a few evenings) there. But I do watch for special or unusual conditions, and when they occur I may well head to an icon like Zabriskie to try to make a photograph that is unlike the usual images.

Since I am in the process of reviewing many Death Valley photographs, don’t be too surprised if a few more older photos from that location show up here soon.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan

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McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan
McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan

McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan. Owens Valley, California. October 10, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Snow crested Mount Morgan rises above McGee Canyon and the sagebrush-covered hills of Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

I’ve been traveling to the Sierra for many years. My first recollection of the range is a faint mental image of a shoreline park at Lake Tahoe when my family moved to California – I was four years old. My next memory is of staying at a small motel in El Portal next to the high water of the Merced River back in the days before the current mega-hotels were erected. One thing that all of my early Sierra experiences had in common is that I always approached the range from the west since I lived (and still live) in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the person whose orientation to the range is from the west, the Sierras are a range that begins almost imperceptibly in the Central Valley. Although you can see distant peaks from the Valley on clear days, it is hard to say where the range begins. As you head east you encounter some very small and rounded hills which gradually get larger. Eventually you are going up more than up and down as you  travel through oak and grass lands. At some point the road rises into forest, but the mountain tops are mostly rounded and forest covered. Keep going and a few rocky prominences begin to appear along the ridges and some distant granite peaks become visible. Only after a lot of driving do you find yourself in the higher reaches of the range, and this only in the few areas where roads cross from west to east. In most places you cannot even see the summit of the range close up from the west without walking a long ways.

It was only many years later that I first went over the summit of the range and saw it from the east side. The Sierra is (are?) completely different when approached this way. Instead of a long, gradual, and relatively gentle rise to high valleys and forests and meadows, the eastern escarpment of the Sierra rises abruptly – one might say violently – and directly, in most places, from the high desert sagebrush country of Owens Valley and similar places. This wall of peaks seems almost inaccessible, and I imagine that many people who only drive past on highway 395 must regard it that way.

This photograph was made from a spot just a mile or two east of highway 395, out an a gravel road that I know. I have photographed this shadowed foreground ridge and the peaks beyond in the past, so I had a fairly good idea of what I would find at this location before I made the photograph on an early October morning when fall storms had dusted the highest peaks with snow. I used a somewhat long lens and tight framing to emphasize the rise from the foreground desert to the very high peaks beyond.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen-Covered Hillside, Reflection

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Aspen-Covered Hillside, Reflection
Aspen-Covered Hillside, Reflection

Aspen-Covered Hillside, Reflection. Sierra Nevada, California. October 2, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Brilliantly colorful aspens ascend a hillside valley above the reflecting surface of a Sierra Nevada lake.

This absurdly colorful hillside above a small lake is a well-known autumn sight in the eastern Sierra above Bishop, California. If you hit it at just the right time and in just the right light, the colors can be almost hallucinogenic. (I’ve heard it called the “Cheetos forest,” for reasons that are probably pretty obvious.)

I’ve been there plenty of times, but have never quite hit the right combination of conditions to get a good shot of the color. I came very close a few years ago, arriving in the pre-dawn hours when there was just enough light to make out the river of color snaking up the small valley above the aspen forest near the lakeshore – but before the sun came up a snow squall swept through. I cowered in my car for half hour to escape the wind, and when I was able to get out and start shooting…. half the leaves that had been there 30 minutes earlier were gone!

The good fortune this time was not just that I was there when the color was strong, but it was also a matter of light and weather conditions. The day started out overcast, and things were looking a bit dull. But soon the clouds began to break up to the east (to the right in the photo) and bright but soft light began to filter though and between the clouds as if someone had set up a giant light panel to the east. Instead of photographing the entire hillside, I decided to photograph the horizontal layers rising from the reflections in the surface of the water, through the shoreline grasses and bushes, past the yellow/orange/gold aspens, and up the slope to the brilliant orange colors above.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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