Tag Archives: hills

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

Badlands and Distant Mountains, Dawn

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Badlands and Distant Mountains, Dawn
Sunrise sky over badlands terrain and distant desert mountains, Death Valley National Park.

Badlands and Distant Mountains, Dawn. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

Sunrise sky over badlands terrain and distant desert mountains, Death Valley National Park.

Recently I wrote that I was finishing up with the photographs from my two early 2022 visits to Death Valley National Park. But things are often not quite what they seem… and I’m not quite done yet. This is a familiar pattern — I work up the most obvious images first, while others take a bit longer. As I approach the end of the archive I inevitably figure out how to work with some that I had overlooked. This is one of those photographs.

I also noted that I took another look at a location that I had dismissed in the past, an interesting place that did not really speak to me photographically. This isn’t the first time that I’ve reconsidered a subject, and a random comment by a friend inspired me to try again. It helped that the light on this morning was both challenging and special — with both the specialness and the challenge coming from the partially cloudy sky. The distant mountains are in the day’s first direct sunlight, while the light on the foreground features is still soft and indirect.

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.

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

Dunes and Hills, Evening

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Dunes and Hills, Evening
Evening light on rocky desert hills and sand dunes, Death Valley National Park.

Dunes and Hills, Evening. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Evening light on rocky desert hills and sand dunes, Death Valley National Park.

You may see a few photographs of this ridge and its low peaks over the next week or two. It was not my main reason for going to this location, nor was it my target when I set out on foot to photograph nearby. But as soon as I started walking I found myself intrigued by its form, the large valley beyond it, and the combination of rocky formations and a thin distribution of blown sand. I ended up photographing it on successive days on my way to and from another subject.

The ridge illustrates an important general fact about much of the Death Valley National Park geography, namely that there are a whole lot of ridges and valleys that trend roughly in a north-south direction. (Technically, the line tens to run sort of northwest to southeast.) It turns out that this is really important to photographers, since much of the early morning and early evening light either strikes features directly or else leaves them in shadow. If you are keeping track of my photographs of this feature, you’ll see a clear example of this. In a previously posted photograph made at one end of the day, the ridge is almost entirely in shadow, with just a bit of rim light near the top, and only the distant mountains are in the sun. Here the table are turned, and the ridge is fully illuminated while the distant mountains are in soft, shadow 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” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Backlit Desert Hills, Morning

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Backlit Desert Hills, Morning
Early morning sun back lights rocky desert hills, Death Valley National Park.

Backlit Desert Hills, Morning. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early morning sun back lights rocky desert hills, Death Valley National Park.

Given the opportunity, I like to visit Death Valley twice each year — once during winter and again around the start of spring. While the spring visit brings the hope of seeing a brief wildflower bloom, winter is less crowded (and, yes, it can be crowded in this park) and feels more elemental. I’m just back from the winter visit, and I had the chance to both revisit some familiar places and push out the boundaries a bit by visiting locations that were new to me.

I was in a fairly remote part of the park on this morning, awake early to walk a mile or so to my intended subject. Due to the sun direction and geography, I didn’t need to start out in complete darkness… which inevitably meant that I was distracted by the landscape as I walked toward my primary goal. The sand-covered hills in this photograph are located at the end of a much taller ridge, and their extension into the large valley beyond places the tallest peaks in the early morning sunlight. More desert mountains rise in the distance beyond the wide valley.

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.

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Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening

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Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening
The last light of an autumn day falls across a group of trees in Owens Valley with the Sierra Nevada in the background.

Owens Valley Trees, Sierra Nevada, Evening. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The last light of an autumn day falls across a group of trees in Owens Valley with the Sierra Nevada in the background.

Landscape photography often feels a bit like hunting to me. I may go to a particular location with a general sense that something worthwhile is likely to happen there — and that sense is often based on some combination of long-developed intuition and knowledge of the antecedent conditions and the current situation. But I often do not have a specific subject or composition in mind. (Sometimes I do, but that is less likely.) In other words, I believe that there is a good chance that I’ll find the sort of thing that appeals to me photographically… so I go to a place at a time because I think the odds are good I’ll find something interesting.

One result is that I have to be ready to discover, change plans, improvise, and respond quickly to whatever I discover. (It also means that there are occasional dead-ends, but I digress…) We went to this spot with something entirely different in mind, but within minutes of arriving I decided that the “something else” was not going to work… and I saw that the line of sunlight coming across Owens Valley was striking this group of trees and that I only had a moment or two to photograph before the light left them. I made an initial exposure in landscape mode, then switched to portrait mode when I noticed more light on the foreground than the background. In the end, I came away with two rather different photographs of these trees — in the landscape version they lie near the bottom of the frame with only more distance subjects above them, while here they are situated beyond the stretch of foreground plants and the distant peaks occupy less of the frame.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.