Strata, Morning Light. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Early morning light on eroded strata with contrasting colors, Death Valley National Park.
This photograph is an example of the transitory nature of light — and how this factor puts the lie to the notion that landscape photography is something always done slowly, at leisure. That is sometimes possible, but more often the most interesting light is fleeting, there only for an instant and sometimes passing its peak before you realize it. Here the layers of colorful strata are in a small canyon, and the light is blocked early in the morning by hills on the other side, behind the camera position. Once the light does arrive, the shadows move down the landscape quickly, and the interval when the light is ideal is brief.
This photograph is also an example of finding balance between an “objective capture” of the scene, a photographic representation of “what it looked like to me,” and something extreme or even fantastical. You have perhaps seen other photographs of these colorful strata, with shades of red, yellow, blue, green and more. Such colors are striking, but they are often quite subtle. In flat or harsh light they are less intense than what you see here. Even in great light and with the kinds of post-processing that I do, the colors are still not exactly intense. I think this subtlety is part of the beauty of these features, and this is lost when the photographer pushes things too far.
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 and Amazon.
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