Tag Archives: sage

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Southern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Cook Bank Ruins, Rhyolite

January 21, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The ruins of the Cook Bank in the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada, with barren desert hills under a pre-sunrise sky.

This was the closest to the winter solstice that I’ve visited Rhyolite, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by several things. First, the sun came up not only later, but also a bit further south along the horizon – and the light that would usually strike these ruins at sunrise was blocked for a while by a large hill that sits next to the town. Second, it was cold! Third, no one else was there at sunrise! This is a bit unusual since in the Death Valley high season (which arrives a bit later in the year), Rhyolite can be a pretty popular place… for a ghost town… in the middle of the desert… in Nevada. :-)

Because I have photographed here several times before and for the reasons mentioned above, I took a bit of a different approach to photographing the place this time. The winter light, some high clouds, and the different point along the horizon of the sun rise meant that the light was quite different from what I’ve occasionally had to work with in the past. At first I was a bit disappointed to realize that the direct dawn light was not going to strike the old Cook Bank and other nearby buildings. But when some clouds to the east obscured the direct light and high, thin overhead clouds begin to pick up color and fill in the shadows, I saw that other interesting lighting was going to make up for it. At the moment that I made this photograph, those clouds to the east (right) of my position beautifully softened what might otherwise have been some stark and harsh light on the pinnacles beyond the town. They also created an unusual and beautiful quality of light for a few moments – a reddish-pink quality from the light reflected from the clouds but with a few soft quality.

I decided to shoot from a distance with a long lens so as to control the position of the ruins against the background hills, and the longer focal length makes these hills more prominent than they would be if I shot the building with a shorter focal length from a closer position. This also allowed me to more carefully eliminate some distracting elements that invariably appear at old sites like this. (The first times I visited, access to most of the ruins was quite unimpeded. Now fences have been erected around some of them. Part of me regrets the loss of access, but the greater part of me understands that this will allow these buildings to be around longer so that more people will get to see them. I stayed behind the fences.) If you look around on the web a bit, you can find some wonderful old photographs of this town when it was a bustling place with thousands of residents, and when the Cook Bank was a very impressive and modern-for-the-time building.

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: Desert, Photographs: Southern California

Petroglyphs

January 20, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Petroglyphs on a rock face overlooking desert terrain.

Encountering these very old and very mysterious traces of people who lived in this desert terrain many, many years ago is always a special experience. Perhaps you have read the following story here before, but I think of it every time I encounter these things. Well over a decade ago I was camped in a place in Death Valley National Park that lies somewhere between popular and the anonymous wild spaces far out in the back areas of the park. I was with a group of other people. In the morning I wandered away from the place where we were camped. I crossed a wash and walked up onto the base of a great alluvial fan, found a suitable “sitting rock,” and just sat there for a while taking in the immense space and silence. I happened to look down at the rocky ground and I an oddly shaped rock caught my attention. I’m no expert on these things, but it seemed completely clear to me that this rock had been shaped by human hands. (I later came to understand that it was probably a “knife,” perhaps one designed for scraping.)

At the moment I saw and then picked up and held this rock, the place was transformed from a semi-wilderness of rock and scattered plants into a very different sort of thing – a place that had been the home of people, many years before I sat there on my rock. My thoughts turned from the landscape around me to try to imagine the person who had created and held this rock – who was this person? what was it like to live in such a place in such a time? what had happened to them? I returned the rock to the desert floor and walked back to my camp.

The petroglyphs in the photograph are located in another place in the park, and I have visited and photographed them more than once. These are perhaps the most precious and among the most fragile things in this desert, which is why I never write about the specifics of their locations. (I also have photographs of petroglyphs that have been defiled by thoughtless morons.) If you know where these are, let’s keep it to ourselves, OK?

The first time I photographed these examples of rock art, I simply shot them straight on so that the shapes were as clear and large as possible. Since then I had been thinking of trying to photograph them in a way that might reveal them in the context of the larger surroundings – perhaps as the person or people who made them might have seen the place.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Frozen Pond and Sierra Nevada Range, Owens Valley

November 4, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The snow-dusted eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada reflected in the surface of a frozen pond on the high desert of Owens Valley, California.

On a very cold early October morning this year I ended up driving out into Owens Valley toward the Owens River after I spotted some interesting morning fog while driving out of Mammoth Lakes on highway 395. Although I had started out with the intention of photographing aspens, when I saw the fog I changed my plans and decided to leave the aspen photography for later. I first drove to a small lake where I have photographed several times in the past, a lake that provides very still water at sunrise and great reflections of the peaks of the Sierra crest which were covered with the snow from a series of early season storms.

After sunrise I decided that I was finished at that lake, so I got back in the vehicle and went exploring on some gravel roads that wander around in the general area of Hot Creek and Owens River. At first I aimed for some ground fog-covered areas that I had spotted earlier, and for a section of creek where the warm water seems to frequently create interesting fog on cold mornings. I arrived at this creek, took a look around, and decided that it wasn’t quite what I wanted to photograph, so I kept driving, ending up on some roads I had not visited before. As I crossed one long flat area of rangeland I passed this mall frozen pond, drove a bit further, and then turned around to come back and photograph it with the early morning – but no longer dawn – like on the snow-covered peaks just south of Mammoth.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Grove, Boulders

October 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A grove of autumn aspen trees among large boulders, Bishop Creek, California.

There is something special and perhaps hard to define about the light inside an aspen grove as the leaves change color in the autumn. It is a visually complex place in many ways – various colorful leaves are overhead, more leaves are dropping constantly to the ground, the ground itself is littered with layers of leaves ranging from brand now and colorful to old and black, other materials such as rocks and grasses and brush may grow between the trees, and the interlocking branches of the closely spaced trees can make progress difficult to nearly impossible. And every grove seems to have its own unique personality. Some will be full of tall and straight trees, and may allow more light in. Others may consist of trees barely taller than a person, and thin-truck trees may be packed closely together. Some have been affected by difficult soil or heavy snow and are full of bent and twisted trees.

This grove is almost within a small campground in the south fork of Bishop Creek. I have shot in this area in the past since a nearby section of the grove often seems to suddenly drop masses of colorful leaves very quickly, so it can be a good place to shoot leaves on the ground. This time, though, I wandered in a different direction and ended up in this area where smallish and seemingly stunted trees grew among large rocks and boulders. The challenge was to try to find a composition in this very busy scene. The first challenge is finding a spot that is open enough to show an expanse of the grove, followed by then moving the camera – sometimes by fractions on an inch – to try to come up with some reasonable alignment of trees and boulders, all the while trying to avoid letting the overly bright sky end up in the frame.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.

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