Dunes and Mountains, Rising Dust. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A desert sandstorm raises towers of dust against a background of rugged mountains obscured by haze.
Continuing here with the 2013 series of Death Valley National Park photographs and, at the moment, a series of photographs made in and around the edges of a big dust storm that swept down the valley late in the day. I made this photograph from a good distance away from the dunes, using a long focal length to bring them a bit closer and to make the more distant mountains fill the background. When the dust is bad, I often work from out along the margins of the worst of it, and here the allowed me to photograph almost straight into the afternoon sun and capture the diffuse and glowing dust-filled atmosphere.
The photograph demonstrates the compositional value of haze and obscured atmosphere in several ways. The generally hazy air glows from the backlight, and it obscures all but the largest forms of the distant mountains — just the barely visible outlines of ridges. Without this haze, the dunes would be overpowered by the structure of those mountains, and the rising towers of dust would be lost against a more complex background.
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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