Early evening light on sand dunes with clouds of wind-driven dust above and desert mountains beyond, Death Valley National Park
As it got closer to sunset on this sandstorm evening in Death Valley, I stopped at a low, black hill that I like to ascend so that I can shoot in a 360 degree panorama from its summit. The hill itself is interesting, it that it is made up of material that is much different from that of the surrounding desert, a sort of very dark layered rock. The hill itself is almost completely bare of vegetation, but the flats around it support a healthy crop of arrow weed plants, which can glow with a golden color in the right light.
While my original plan was to photograph the further dunes, from here I saw the conjunction of the golden arrow weed plants, the dark curve of the barren black hill, the bright light and shadows on the taller dunes, the clouds of blowing sand beyond the dunes, and in the far distance the lower peaks and ridges of the Cottonwood Mountains. This is an example of an opportunistic photograph, in that I did not plan on this scene beforehand and because the light died within a minute or two of the time I arrived.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Towering clouds of wind-blown sand rise above desert sand dunes, Death Valley National Park
In the early afternoon, a bit to my surprise and somewhat to my consternation, after returning to camp from shooting in another area of the park I got my first hints of the upcoming afternoon and evening sand storm when I noticed an increasing number of dust devils out by the dunes and when blowing dust began to rise along the far eastern side of the Valley. Although these events can be photogenic (and a bit dangerous to camera gear!) they are not very pleasant to be in, a fact that I know from previous experience. However, given that the weather otherwise had been pretty boring – too much blue sky! – at least this promised something a bit out of the ordinary.
So as the afternoon wore on I headed out, driving toward the eastern side of the Valley. As I passed this classic view of what is probably the most famous set of dunes in the Valley, large and thick dust clouds were rising behind the dunes. Oddly, there wasn’t all that much sand blowing on these dunes – just behind them on lower dunes farther north and east. So I paused to use the long lens to isolate the dunes, with their sparse plants, in the afternoon light with clouds of blowing sand mostly obscuring the peaks of the Grapevine Mountains in the Amargosa Range.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
The tracks of a passing animal among small pebbles in evening shadows on the dunes, Death Valley National Park
The day before I made this photograph a huge wind/dust storm had swept across Death Valley, raising tall clouds of dust high into the air, blowing away tents and anything else not firmly tied down, and spreading a thin film of dust into cars, tents, sleeping bags, and just about everything else. The idea of a desert dust/sand storm is interesting and exciting, and there are certainly some elements in this weather that are photographically compelling – but the reality is that they can make like quite difficult for a while.
On the other hand, after the dust storm passes, many of the usual traces of human presence are temporarily erased from sand dune areas. So on this evening after the dust storm I wandered out into low dunes away from the more popular areas and saw virtually no human tracks where I ended up. However, I did non-human tracks, perhaps more clearly given that there were fewer of them and they were isolated against the newly clean and smooth wind-blown sand. I just happened to spot these small tracks (a lizard?) as I entered a small “dune” valley. I first noticed the uppermost shape, which reminded me of a small branch or twig or possibly a bit of coral. I soon noticed the more linear track up the middle of the branch-like tracks – a tail? – and thought I might be able to make a photographic composition out of these tracks, a few small rocks embedded in the sand, and some of the early afternoon shadows across the sand.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
The dry remnants of a dead plant in recently wind-blown sand dune, Death Valley National Park
I have been visiting Death Valley regularly for perhaps fifteen years, typically photographing there for nearly a week every year for the past decade, and occasionally more. On my most recent trip, from which I returned only days ago, I was thinking about a number of thing regarding my experience with the place and how it has changed. On my first visits there was, of course, the excitement and wonder of discovering a place that was essentially completely new to me. I recall that on my first trip there I got close to the Race Track without going all the way to this location. We camped not far from that playa and I imagined this place that I had heard so much about and even envisioned it in a particular location – and when I did visit a year or two later I discovered that it was quite a bit different from what I imagined, though magical in different and perhaps more powerful ways. After a few years of visiting and photographing the best known iconic sites I began to find them less interesting, and though I continued to photograph them when the opportunity arose, I focused more on expanding the areas I knew about and on looking more closely at areas I thought I knew.
As I did this, I have to confess that portions of the Death Valley experience baffled me or even put me off a bit. While I found some of the terrain to be tremendously beautiful, there were other aspects that I just couldn’t quite relate to. As a person who has spent a lot of time in forested places with flowing water – mainly the Sierra Nevada – I found some areas of this desert to be, quite honestly, boring. I drove through or past them on my way to what I thought of as the more interesting places where I could find colors outside of the range from tan to gray and where some special object or formation might create an obvious center of interest. However, from time to time I would be surprised to find in some plain, nondescript, and even boring place an experience of stillness, immense space, and deep silence that I had rarely encountered elsewhere. More and more, I began to see this as a primary attraction of this landscape – more so in many cases that the specific features of this pinnacle or that formation or the other valley.
On this recent trip, conditions conspired to make me look more closely at some of these things that I had originally overlooked. The conditions were such that if I had experienced them a few years ago I might have simply left. (In fact, that thought did cross my mind once or twice on this trip.) The spectacular light really never came, skies were cloudy, the air was hazy, it was very hot, the winds blew strongly, and there was a dust storm. During the first couple of day, with the exception of shooting the dust storm, many of the subjects I had in mind simply didn’t work out the way I planned. A bit surprisingly, without the possibility of shooting yet another beautiful golden hour sunset image of a spectacular bit of geography (though I did do some of that still) I slowed down and looked more closely at some of those “boring” places that I had passed through more quickly in the past.
This photograph was made in one of those locations. It was not far from one of those iconic locations, but it wasn’t the iconic spot at all. An hour or so before sunset I simply wandered away from the road, past vegetation and into the sand, and started looking around. In the low spots between dunes, the world beyond was out of sight and the wind was blocked, and as the light faded I encountered again that deep and powerful and timeless silence that is so hard to find almost anywhere else.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
