Tag Archives: north

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

Detail, Overlapping Gullies – Zabriskie Point

March 23, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Detail photograph of the patterns of overlapping gullies near Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park.

I have been working on a sort of informal project to photograph small details at Zabriskie Point that do not necessarily reveal the larger, familiar, and very iconic landscape of the place. A few years ago I noticed – almost by accident – that certain features of the surrounding landscape can be photographed in conditions quite different from the “standard” dawn and very early morning lighting. In fact, some of the geology can, I think, be photographed in interesting ways even during unusual times of the day when there is full sunlight. A bit later in the morning the light, which tends to glance across the tops of some features earlier in the day, begins to penetrate down into the little valleys and gullies and reflect into them from some of the brighter surfaces. While it can work in full sun, it may work even better when there is a bit of overcast, as there was when I made this photograph and a couple others in the series.

With this specific subject I also tend to work from a bit of a distance using long focal length lenses. This one was shot at 400mm! This poses a problem that we don’t encounter as often when using more (supposedly) typical landscape focal lengths, namely that it is hard to get the whole subject in focus due to depth of field issues that become more apparent with such long lenses.

Also, when photographing these rather pale and pastel formations, it is very easy to succumb to the temptation to jazz things up a bit. To be honest, I have seen some very good and interesting work that relied on amplifying contrast and the subtle colors. However, I’m trying hard to not go too far with this. I certainly do some work in post to balance things out a bit and to get the effect that I think best evokes what I recall of the scene, but I’m avoiding the inclination to, for example, adjust curves to the point that I get a lot of pure blacks and whites in this subject that mostly contains bright mid-tones.

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

Zabriskie Point Badlands, Morning Snow on the Panamint Range

March 10, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Morning light on fresh snow on the summit of the Panamint Range with Zabriskie Point Badlands in the foreground, Death Valley National Park.

After getting being frustrated by falling snow earlier in the morning when I tried to photograph dawn at Dantes View I headed back down to lower terrain. (Although I was not successful in photographing at Dantes View and, in fact, turned back before the summit in dense clouds and falling snow, it was quite an interesting visit!) I stopped along the way and made some photographs before arriving at Zabriskie Point.

At this point I no longer reflexively photograph at Zabriskie, though I will if something special or unusual is happening with the conditions. Having been frustrated in my original plans, I figured I might as well take a look around since I was there. I left the camera gear in my car and walked up the hill to the famous overlook to see what I could see. The dawn light – if there had even been any on this cloudy morning – was long gone, though a few photographers were still hanging out. As I looked about I noticed two things. First, the clouds were just beginning to thin over the Panamint range. While the summit of Telescope Peak was still socked in – it appeared to be snowing there – light was beginning to break through gaps in the clouds above the east side of the range and interesting shadows were appearing below the snow line. Second, the partially cloudy conditions were softening the light right in the Zabriskie/Gower Gulch area and the light in some of my favorite small gullies to the right of the observation area was looking somewhat interesting. (I have made a project of photographing them with a long lens.)

With no other specific plan, and two potential subjects right here, I followed one of those “laws of photography” that says shoot the thing you see now rather than continuing to wander around hoping that some other miracle crops up. (Sometimes this is great advice. Other times it is dead wrong!) I walked back down the hill to my car, grabbed my gear, and walked back up. I first spent some time photographing the nearby gullies. (I think I have a couple of interesting images of them that will appear here eventually.) But I quickly turned my attention to the interesting weather and light across the Valley, thinking about how I might photograph this wild and rugged scene without making it look like another Zabriskie Point image. I decided to use a relatively long focal length lens – which was already on the camera for shooting the gullies anyway – and try to fill the entire frame with a combination of close and far mountains and snow and clouds in the morning light.

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

Remains of a Desert Plant, Pebbles

March 9, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The skeletal branches of a dead plant against the pebbles of a desert wash, Death Valley National Park, California.

I came across the skeletal remains of this desert plant while photographing along the east side of Death Valley near the area identified on some maps as the Kit Fox Hills. I had just finished photographing across the floor of the Valley, capturing an area full of sparse desert plants backlit by the very last rays of sun, and the light had diminished after the sun dropped below the tops of the ridges on the west side of the Valley.

I saw this bit of dead plant near the edge of a wash among the rubble of many-colored rocks and pebbles that had, I presume, been washed down from the canyons in the mountains to the east. For a place that seems so colorless from a distance, there is an astonishing variety of color in these rocks. I can see greens, blues, various shades of pink and purple, and some that almost are orange. The branches are just as I found them, and the soft light with just a bit of directionality from the right fills the shadows that would otherwise be very dark.

Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects

North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay, Morning

February 14, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, with San Francisco Bay, the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, a departing ship, and the East Bay hills beyond in morning fog and haze.

I’ve been working on the color version of this photograph, which proved to be a bit more tricky than I would have expected. My recollection of the light on this morning was that it was very bright – with the backlit haze/fog – and quite blue. But, as often happens, the coloration in the camera was dissonant with my memory, and I had to think a bit about where I wanted to go with the photography in post. In particular, the sky had an odd pink cast that can often become more obvious when using a long lens and only keeping a bit of the sky right above the horizon.

The background on this photograph (and several others in the same series) is that it was made on an early February morning shortly after sunrise from a point high in the Marin Headlands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. For the most part it was actually a brilliantly sunny and clear morning, but an inversion layer was creating a thin blanket of fog/haze that was almost too bright to look at and which muted the details of the landscape. (It was also tremendously windy – making it a challenge to shoot with a long lens!) After making a few initial exposures from a more obvious location – and one that was slightly out of the wind – I decided to wander a bit and look for juxtapositions of various landscape elements with the shape of the north tower of the bridge. After a short walk I found this spot where the tower was centered between the two towers of the more distant western span of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, and where the view included a bit of the San Francisco waterfront along the right margin and the fog-covered flatlands below the East Bay hills.

As I worked I noticed a freighter leaving the Port of Oakland beyond the further bridge. I’ve watched enough of these ships heading across the bay that I have a pretty good idea of the path they follow, and I knew that this one would cross beneath the Bay Bridge and then turn to cross the frame towards the left – so I waited for it to reach the position just barely to the left of the closer bridge tower before making this exposure.

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