Tag Archives: playa

Imaginary Landscape — Blue

Imaginary Landscape — Blue
“Imaginary Landscape — Blue” — An imaginary desert landscape.

My imaginary landscape photographs begin with photographic materials from actual landscapes and then morph them in various ways. The results range from slight variations on landscape themes to images that don’t have any obvious connection to real places. This imaginary landscape began with a photograph of the surface of a playa with scattered small stones.

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Boardwalk, Morning

Boardwalk, Morning
“Boardwalk, Morning” — The winding boardwalk at Salt Creek in morning light, Death Valley.

We arrived at Salt Creek before sunrise, planning to walk down to the end of the boardwalk and photograph some further areas at dawn. It used to be that you could continue on from there and investigate other interesting terrain, but there is now no obvious way off the boardwalk, likely because the park service is trying to protect those areas. So we photographed from the boardwalk as the sun came up.

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Fractured Surface

Fractured Surface
“Fractured Surface” — Fractured dry mud, Death Valley.

Yes, more dried mud! As I have written before, for reasons that still mystify me, this is an irresistible subject for many landscape photographers… and I’m no exception. What explains it? The colors? The contrast with surroundings? The fractal shapes?

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Panamint Valley

Panamint Valley
“Panamint Valley” — View across Rainbow Canyon toward the flats of Panamint Valley.

Death Valley National Park is a huge landscape, in more ways that one. The park is huge. It is the largest park in the contiguous states. (Alaska, where everything is on a larger scale, has four larger parks.) Within the park we often are able to view huge distances — in fact, Death Valley’s visual scale reminds me of places I’ve seen in Alaska. Here we look down Rainbow Canyon and across the entire Panamint Valley (one valley west of Death Valley itself) toward more desert mountains.

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