Tag Archives: outdoors

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: People In Landscape, Photographs: Southern California

Two Hikers, Titus Canyon

Image March 27, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Two hikers descending the narrows of Titus Canyon.

Earlier this month I visited Death Valley National Park for a few days. I go there and photograph at least once each year — I’ve been visiting for a couple of decades and photographing the place seriously for about fifteen years. I often point out that there are few places where the effects of water are more obvious than in this unlikely location. Almost all features of the park are formed or sculpted by water, and these effects are very visible in the early bare desert landscape. I arrived only a day after extremely heavy rains, and the evidence was everywhere — flooded sections of roadway, wet and muddy washes, dunes that were still damp, large shallow lakes on playas.

Many park roads were closes, including the long dirt road through Titus Canyon. The road starts high in Amargosa Canyon, crosses the mountains, descends toward the Valley, and near the end passes through a section of very narrow canyon. Normally there is enough traffic there to interrupt the reverie of hikers, but the road was closed to vehicle traffic and we (some members of my family) and I enjoyed a long and quiet hike up the canyon. Here two hikers (my sister and her husband) are descending though one of the deeper and narrower sections of the canyon.

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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Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: People In Landscape

Hiker, Desert Canyon, Natural Bridge

June 2, 2018 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A hiker passes under a natural bridge in a Death Valley National Park canyon

Timing seems to matter a lot when photographing and hiking in Death Valley. A whole range of factors come into play: distances between locations, times of day with best light, concerns about temperature, and so on. Over the years I have come up with the rough outlines of a daily schedule — which I frequently violate! — to adapt to the general patterns. I usually start the day with a pre-dawn and sunrise location, and then move to a second early to mid morning place. In many cases I take a midday break — when camping I use this to lounge around camp, eat, nap, or else to drive to more distant spots — Then there is often an afternoon location, followed by a sunset and early evening spot. The dawn and sunset angle is probably obvious to most readers, but what about the mid-morning and afternoon spots? These are often in canyons, which can be a bit too dark at the edges of the day, but which often get nice light a bit after sunrise and before sunset. Bonus benefit: they produce shade during hot parts of the day.

On this day we were using this plan, so we took a mid-morning hike up this narrow canyon, enjoying the opportunities to escape the direct sun and the beautiful light in the bottom of the canyon, as it bounced down from above and between the canyon walls. Here a hiker (my wife Patty) went ahead of me beneath this big natural bridge and headed on towards the mouth of the canyon not far beyond.

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

Hikers in the Badlands

May 6, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A group of hikers is dwarfed by arid badlands terrain near Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park

In the midst of all the recent Death Valley photographs, with this photograph I reached back into the archives to pull up an older image that had not previously made it out of the collection of raw files. Various things impel me to dig back into the older photographs to see what I’ve missed, and in this case it was a random visit to my website that I noted in my server log — someone had linked in to a photograph of some photographers in Death Valley from this 2007 trip. When I saw that I thought to go back and look at that particular photograph and update it just a bit, and then I got side-tracked and wandered off into that raw file collection.

I recall this photograph rather clearly. For some reason I had stopped at Zabriskie point on a morning that I probably expected to produce an exceptional sunrise — at least that’s my guess based on the kind of clouds in the photograph. If I recall correctly, the morning did produce some interesting soft light, but not the stunner that I thought might happen. (I rarely stop at Zabriskie, but I make an exception if the conditions look like they might produce something unexpected — but you never know until you actually go there before dawn and see what happens.) I remember looking down toward Gower Gulch and the trail to Golden Canyon and spotting this string of five hikers. It isn’t that unusual to see people on this trail, but they stuck close together as the wound along its twisting route, and I thought that this might produce some interesting photographs and reveal the scale of this landscape.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Tree and Granite, Pywiack Dome

August 5, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A weathered juniper tree grows high on the granite face of Pywiack Dome, Yosemite National Park.

This is another “take” on the same juniper tree high up on the slopes of Pywiack Dome that was seen in another photograph of this area that I posted earlier this week. I went through a process of “refining” the photograph that I described in the earlier post, and this was the interpretation that I came up with right before the landscape orientation version that I posted earlier. Unlike that photograph, this one frames the area of the dome containing the tree more tightly.

The color balance is a bit different in this one, also. I thought about that quite a bit, at first feeling that the coloration should be essentially identical since the images were made at about the same time and include some of the same subject matter. But the more I thought about it – and the more I experimented with the results of trying for uniformity – the more I felt that the two photographs are different images and that different interpretations make sense.

These trees never cease to amaze me. I often come across what are evidently very old trees that seem to grow almost straight out of solid rock, and only a closer inspection reveals that roots have grown tightly into small and unlikely cracks and weaknesses in the granite. That this tree should have managed to take root half way up the side of this large dome is even more amazing, much less that it managed to avoid growing into the stunted and twisted sort of shape that is so common among such trees.

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