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G Dan Mitchell Photographs at Stovepipe Wells

April 30, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 8 Comments

G Dan Mitchell Photographs, Stovepipe Wells Lodge

Since several people have asked, I thought I would share an update on installation of my photographs at the historic Stovepipe Wells Lodge in Death Valley National Park. Late last year Ortega Family Enterprises (who also sell some of my photographs at Muir Woods National Monument) contacted me. They were about to take over the management of the facility from the previous concessionaire and were interested in selling some of my Death Valley photographs in the gift shop at Stovepipe Wells.

It turns out that they were also planning some significant upgrades to the lodging facilities at Stovepipe and they asked if I could provide a large number of 16″ x 24″ prints for the guest rooms. To make a long story short, they selected a half dozen of my Death Valley photographs and I went to work making nearly 170 prints of the six photographs, which were then shipped off to their framer for final preparation.

I finally got a chance to see the results when I visited Death Vally in early April. I stopped by and found out that they had begun the process of hanging the prints in guest rooms, and with the help of an employee I was able to get in long enough to snap a shot of one of the rooms. (Hanging in this room are “Transverse Dunes, Death Valley“ and “Crossing Tracks, Racetrack Playa.”) It was also good to see some work being done to upgrade and update the lodge!

It is gratifying to have my photographs installed here for several reasons. Several of the photographs were made virtually within walking distance of Stovepipe Wells, where I often camp when I visit the Valley. I also know that among the many people who visit Stovepipe will be a good number of my fellow photographers – and knowing that they will see my prints here is both a bit intimidating and a quite exciting! Finally, before Ortega took over the facility I often stopped to look at some of the photographs and paintings that had been there previously. (I was glad to see that one wonderful black and white photograph was still hanging in the hotel office.) With that in mind, it seems like there is a good chance that these photographs of mine may be hanging in this historic facility for some time to come!

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Playa Surface, Panamint Valley

April 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Cracked and dry surface of the playa in Panament Valley, Death Valley National Park.

This micro-scene could be found in many locations in Death Valley and, for that matter, in many places in the USA and around the rest of the planet. But my little rectangle of the patterns of drying and cracked mud comes from the surface of the Playa (sometimes called “Panamint Lake?”) in upper Panamint Valley in Death Valley National Park. I wrote previously that it was the last day of my late-March photographic visit to Death Valley – I had finished my photography in the main Valley and had started the long drive back to the Bay Area. After crossing Towne Pass the road descends into Panamint Valley to a junction where I most often go south towards Trona and Ridgecrest and beyond.

Just before this junction the road crosses the playa, an extraordinarily flat surface formed when silt washed down from the surrounding mountains occasionally pools and gradually dries, forming what may be the flattest surfaces on the planet. As the moisture evaporates the mud cracks and splits into these interesting semi-geometrical patterns.

For no particular reason other than that this is a spot where I often make one final stop before leaving the park, I pulled over and wandered out onto the playa. I enjoy walking on these often-immense flat surfaces, but there is something very odd about the experience, too. Perhaps it is the slightly odd feeling of walking on such a large floor-flat surface in the natural world, or it might be the deep silence and stillness. In any case, as I wandered around not too far from the road I started looking a bit more closely at the patterns of cracks and soon decided that my photography was not quite finished yet – so I went back to the car to get my camera and made a small series of hand-held photographs with the camera pointing straight down. (The “straight down” shooting raises a question: How should the photograph be oriented? The horizontal orientation shown here is what I saw as I made the photograph… but I also wonder about rotating it 90″ clockwise.)

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

Hill Near Mesquite Flat, Dusk

April 23, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dusk light above a hill near Mesquite Flat in Death Valley, backed by a large alluvial fan from Tucki Mountain.

At the end of this day I was shooting from the top of a low hill in the Valley east of Stovepipe Wells, and there were interesting subjects throughout almost the entire 360 degree panorama around this elevated position. With this in mind, I had chosen to use the long 100-400mm zoom so that I could have some flexibility in composing elements of this huge scene.

I was mainly working with things that were in the large arc to my west (dunes and Cottonwood mountains and base of Tucki Mountain), north (the main Valley and transverse dunes), and east (the mountains running along that edge of the Valley) since the further subjects of the lower Valley were more or less out of sight beyond the alluvial fan that appears in the photograph. But I kept being intrigued by the low, dark hill on the flats below the similar hill on which I was standing. There is a row of them stretching from near the Devils Cornfield area up and across this alluvial fan. As the evening light transitioned towards post-sunset light I saw that the glow from clouds (a bit of which is visible in the distance above the Black Mountains) was lighting this hill and the surrounding flats in an interesting and colorful way.

But I had a little problem. I was still working a number of subjects and once and I really needed to keep shooting that 100-400. 100mm was still too long for this scene, but I didn’t have time to remove it and put on a shorter lens. I figured that I could simply change the camera to vertical orientation, very carefully level the tripod, and include the whole scene in four panning vertical frames that I could stitch together later. People often do this so that they can produce extremely high-resolution image, but that wasn’t my goal at all. In any case, it worked, and not only did I manage to get the shot that needed a wider lens, but as a bonus it is a very high-resolution shot.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Branch on Playa, Panamint Valley

April 8, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A lone branch lies across dried mud on the playa of Panamint Valley, Death Valley National Park.

First, a story about the location. My first visit to Death Valley was sometime in the late 1990s, when the “hiking and biking” club at my kids’ middle and high school did a trip there. The club is a long and interesting story that I don’t have time or space to describe here fully. Suffice it to say that the teacher, “Mr. Hodges,” had for decades taken kids on amazing outdoor adventures throughout the western United States every year, and that the trip that year was to involve visits to several places in the park and then a backpacking trip down to the Valley from up in the Teakettle Junction vicinity. This may sound like a crazy thing to do with a bunch of school kids, but the group had a record of success. I was along as a parent chaperone since my oldest son was a participant in the trip.

The “readers digest” version of the story of the trip is that, as is often the case near the beginning of April, we encountered an astonishing range of weather conditions. Early on it snowed and the wind blew at gale force levels. This forced us to abandon our initial backpacking plans after we had already camped overnight near Teakettle Junction, and to head back down to the Valley. We readjusted our plans and decided that we might still be able to do an overnight hike down the length of the upper Valley and (leaving out a bunch of intervening adventures in this narrative) we arrived at Stovepipe Wells and set up camp… just in time for a tremendous dust storm to blow in. The next morning the “bus” arrived that was to take the kids and a few of the chaperones home (the rest of us were in a truck carrying tons – literally – of gear on the roof rack and in a trailer) and we headed up to cross Towne Pass. It turned out that the “bus” (which was more or less a large airport shuttle-type van) was ill-equipped for these conditions and after struggling up the pass and then racing down the other side, the transmission blew out at the bottom of the descent into Panamint Valley. Those of us in the truck pulling the trailer arrived a few minutes later to find a group of scared kids and parents who had just experienced more excitement than they wanted.

I have a strong visual memory of “Mary,” one of the parents, who had just had a bit too much excitement walking quietly north away from the road and across this playa. Ever since that time, this place that most people would probably blow right past, has almost always warranted a stop as I passed by on my way out of the Valley. This trip was no exception. I left my camera gear in the car and just walked a ways out onto the playa. As I walked, even though I had been certain that my photography for this trip was finished, I started noticing some of the small details on the playa… and I went back to my car to get my camera, then returned and made a few hand-held exposures of some of these small subjects.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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