A red rock gully among the desert hills of the Panamint Range, Death Valley National Park.
This is anything but an iconic image, but I think that it is emblematic of a certain type of scene that is often seen in Death Valley National Park once you get out of the main Valley and up into the hills, especially during the brief spring season when the light can be a bit softer and the plants a bit (relatively speaking!) greener.
The photograph looks up a broad valley that is visible from along the road that rises from the main road through the Valley and climbs toward the Wildrose Canyon area. Here the elevation is high enough that the dry, sun-baked flat land of the Valley is nowhere to be found. Instead this is a country of large valleys and plateaus, cut in places (mostly at the bottom of canyons) but rocky outcroppings and gullies. This red rock gully is easily visible from the road, though the odds are that most people just drive right by. I had seen it on several drives past this spot before I thought to stop and photograph it, and I was fortunate to be there when the light seemed just right.
Dawn light on the based of the Cottonwood Mountains at the edge of Death Valley.
This is (yet another) one of those photographs that is the result of some odd combination of “planning” and serendipity. When I travel somewhere to do photography I often, though not always, have some ideas about certain types of subjects I would like to photograph or about ways I’d like to photograph them. On this visit to Death Valley I had a few such ideas in mind – one of them had to do with scenes that filled the frame with the rugged and forbidding and seemingly lifeless mountains and valleys and ridges of the place. Another had to do with photographing in the early light along the west side of the Valley, something I thought about but didn’t really try on my previous visit. This photograph and a few others like grew out of those ideas.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t have been in this spot at this moment if I had not had an electrical problem with my car! The night before I had returned to the campground from a bit of late shooting, parked the car, and went about my “camp business” before crawling into the tent and setting my alarm for an appropriate pre-dawn hour so that I could arrive at a particular location before the sun came up. The alarm went off at the appointed time, and a few minutes later I emerged from my tent and got into my car. It wouldn’t start. I soon realized that the car was electrically “dead” – no interior lights, etc. Since it was still completely dark, the idea of doing auto repair outside the tents and RVs of lots of other sleeping campers was out of the question, so I went back into my tent and speculated uncomfortably about the potential costs of towing and automobile repair in Death Valley.
Later, as the sky began to lighten, I heard other campers stirring. I got up – again – and opened the engine compartment to find that one of the battery cables had come off, perhaps as I drove a rather rough road the previous day! Relieved to find that this was something that I could fix, I reattached the cable, quickly got in the car, and figured I would see what I could salvage of the morning shoot. I headed west across the Valley toward Towne Pass, thinking about photographing some snow that was high on the ridge. As I drove I saw that the first light had still not quite reached the Valley floor along the base of the Cottonwood Range. I quickly found a slight rise along the road where the view wasn’t obstructed by desert plants, pulled over, put on the long lens, and made a few photographs as this beautiful light worked its way down the face of the range and began to work its way out across the giant wash along the edge of the Valley.
“Richardson Bay, Morning” — Photograph of Richardson Bay from Marin hills, showing Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, downtown Oakland, East Bay Hills, and Mount Diablo in the distance.
This photograph was shot from essentially the same position as the previous one, a black and white photo of the same vista, though with shorter focal length. I used a longer focal length here to try to enlarge to closer elements and leave out some of the stuff along the edges, and to minimize the amount of sky to some extent. I liked the color version of this – it was hard for me to think about giving up the nice overall blue haze, but even more to give up the was of light on some of the green grassy areas at the bottom of the frame.
There is quite a bit of stuff in this image, so let me describe what you see. At the bottom of the frame are hills above Marin City. Beyond the foreground hills you see Richardson Bay, which is an arm of San Francisco Bay near the entrance to Golden Gate. Across the bay we see the hills of the Tiburon Peninsula and beyond that looms the peak of Angel Island. In the distance and across San Francisco the buildings of downtown Oakland are visible through the low level backlit morning haze. Beyond are the East Bay Hills and the furthest peak is Mount Diablo, all the way out past Concord.
The San Francisco Bay and the haze covered East Bay beyond the waters of Richardson Bay.
When I headed over the Golden Gate on this early February winter morning I intended to end up photographing redwoods or along the coast north of San Francisco in the morning before heading south to go back home by midday. I ended up getting distracted by very interesting shooting conditions in the Marin Headlands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and by the time I finished there I didn’t have enough remaining time to carry through on my original plans. But I did have a little time left, so I headed up to this spot along a ridge above Marin City where I know of a great view out over Richardson Bay, the Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, the Bay, past fog-shrouded Oakland, and on to the East Bay Hills.
This is a long lens landscape shot, for several reasons. First, the somewhat longer lens – though 159mm isn’t all that long – compresses distance a bit, both bringing Oakland’s downtown buildings a bit “closer” and foreshortening the very large distances a bit. It also lets me “edit” out some potentially distracting elements close to my shooting position and limit the scope of the image to just those elements that I wanted to include.
