Tag Archives: mountains

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

Death Valley, Evening

May 19, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light on the playa of Death Valley, with lower slopes of the Panamint Mountains rising beyond

Since I’ve been traveling to and around Death Valley National Park for more than 15 years now, I’ve seen a lot of the park — but I most certainly have not see all of it, nor have I completely learned how to see everything in it. This is a huge place, varying greatly by location, terrain, season, weather and more. Frankly, the experience of coming to know such a place over time is one of the things I value most about such locations. While I love to “discover” a place that is completely new to me (and Death Valley was that place in the late 1990s for me), the longer process of learning the place and its rhythms more deeply is also, I think, more rewarding. It is wonderful to see a desert gully in evening light for the first time, but it may be even more beautiful to come back to it and recognize an old and familiar friend.

Along these lines, a few years ago, as I continued to push out my own boundaries of experience and knowledge in Death Valley, I began to think more about how to make photographs of things that I might have not thought worthy of a photograph before. I realized that many of these things that don’t scream “photograph me!” are otherwise a core part of the experience of this place: a vast and quiet “empty” landscape, midday sun, haze obscuring great distances, the edge between the last vegetation and a barren playa, a beam of light slanting across an alluvial fan. And if they are central to the sense of the place, it seems that there must be a way to photograph them. And that is a new challenge for me in my Death Valley photography.

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Photographs: Germany, Photographs: Nature

Bavarian Alps, Berchtesgaden National Park

May 18, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Bavarian Alps rise above Königsee in Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany

Over the course of a summer week in 2013 we had a lot of opportunities to gaze at these Bavarian Alps. We spent a week with family in the Berchtesgaden area, staying in a big farm-house with views across a bucolic valley and into the mountains as they rose to the summit of the Watzmann, the second-highest peak in Germany. We did the “tourist thing” and rode the electric boats up the Königsee Lake between high ridges, and on one memorable day we visited Jennerbahn, took the tram to the top, and spent the rest of the day descending alpine valleys on foot — with a mid-hike stop for snacks and a beer!

During our stay I think I got a sense of how these mountains are different from my “home range” of the Sierra Nevada — though I would need a much longer stay and more hiking to get to know them well. Because they are built from different sorts of rock, the shapes of the peaks are often quite different. The tall rugged peaks also rise almost directly from relative lowlands — for example, a short hike took us from the lake to the base of a huge cliff at Die Eiskapelle, a place that felt thoroughly alpine. In the Sierra we have kept vast stretches of the range relatively wild, isolated from human structures to the point that one can imagine that he/she is in a fully wild place. In the alps there are huts, and you can stop for a beer in the middle of an afternoon hike! The ridges and valley in this photograph rise from the shoreline of the Königsee.

Photographs: Germany, Photographs: Nature

Forested Cliffs, Königsee

May 12, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Steep, tree-covered cliffs along the shore of the Königsee, Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany

I 2013 we spent a magical week in the Berchtesgaden area of Bavaria, right next to the Berchtesgaden National Park and a short drive from Salzburg, Austria. This was part of a longer trip that began in London and also included an additional week in the Heidelberg, Germany area. We met up with members of Patty’s family, and this big extended family group stayed at a big, rambling farm-house in Bavaria, from which the backyard view from the outdoor table where we often ate included a chunk of the Bavaria Alps culminating in the summit of the Watzmann, the second-tallest peak in Germany.

The Königsee was a short distance away. In a loose way, Königsee feels just a little like a Yosemite Valley with a Lake filling it. The lake sits in a long, narrow valley surrounded by much higher mountains — though these mountains have a more alpine appearance than those visible from the floor of Yosemite Valley. It also includes some of the “touristy” features of Yosemite — the lake itself is most certainly no longer a wilderness. One of the most popular of those features is the system providing boat rides up the length of the lake. (In deference to the purity of the lake water, these boats are powered by electricity.) The boat ride is quite something, beginning at a place that truly is “touristy,” but soon passing through this narrow section of the lower lake between steep, tree-covered cliffs, before the terrain opens up revealing longer views further up the lake.

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

Dunes and Arid Mountains

April 29, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Low sand dunes against a backdrop of the arid mountains of the east side of Death Valley

I made this photograph early during my evening visit to the lower portions of these sand dunes, before the sun had dropped low enough to really warm the color of the light but when the shadows were beginning to lengthen. Looking at this expanse of dunes, with shapes reminiscent of ocean waves, I considered whether to include or avoid the bits of life scattered though the dunes — and decided to mostly leave them out, except that I did build the composition around a small clump of branches poking out of the dunes in the center foreground, lining myself up to put an interesting and rugged set of mountains in the right spot beyond the sand.

The distant mountains are the Grapevine Mountains, which are actually a section of the larger Amargosa Range that runs along the east side of Death Valley. These are rugged, arid, rocky, and sun blasted mountains, with little evidence that much grows there. Late in the day the light on the mountains, and especially in shadows, shifts toward blue tones and the textures of the three layers of the scene seem connected and related — the foreground dunes, the middle distance low hills at the base of the higher mountains, and then the lower slopes of the Amargosa Range.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: mountains

Death Valley, Evening

Bavarian Alps, Berchtesgaden National Park

Forested Cliffs, Königsee

Dunes and Arid Mountains

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.