Tag Archives: salt

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

Salt Flat Patterns

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Salt Flat Patterns
Salt Flat Patterns

Salt Flat Patterns. Death Valley National Park, California. March 30, 2011. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Detail of a section of Death Valley salt flats as seen from Dantes View

Death Valley is often not quite what it seems to be. Repeat visits and views from different perspectives – far away, very close up, from above – begin to reveal things that you might not see at first. From next to and on the salt flats in the lowest section of the Valley, you see a very desolate terrain – one of the most non-human terrains I know. Here, well below sea level, there are places that seem completely inhospitable and alien, landscapes of caked salt, worked and sharp-edged salt and dried mud, seeps of shallow water, occasional odd plants, and landscape that often seems to go on almost endlessly the same way. But just as looking more closely reveals surprises (such as living creatures in those millimeters-deep pools of salty water), the view from overhead shows patterns that cannot be readily seen up close.

This photograph was made from the summit of Dantes View. This high point along the eastern side of the valley is close to a mile above the Valley floor. The view can often be panoramic, stretching for tremendous distances in almost all directions, blocked only by the higher peaks of the Panamint Range to the west and a few other high points nearby. Although Dantes View is one of the best known “iconic” locations in the park, I have a complicated relationship with the place. First of all, I seem to attract awful weather when I go there, perhaps because I tend to do so in the season that is winter elsewhere in the state. Not too long ago I attempted to drive to the summit on a winter day and was turned back by a snow storm perhaps a half mile from the end of the road. In addition, it has been hard for me to warm up to the place as a photographic subject. In some ways, there is almost just too much in the view for me to see how to isolate a photograph out of that detailed immensity. I dealt with that here by using a very long lens and restricting my view to a small section of the valley floor, without much context of surrounding terrain, which I think produces a photograph that allows the features in this frame to be seen as abstractions.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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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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

First Light, Southern Death Valley

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First Light, Souithern Death Valley - As seen from Aguereberry Point, first dawn light spills across the lower end of Death Valley.
As seen from Aguereberry Point, first dawn light spills across the lower end of Death Valley.

First Light, Southern Death Valley. Death Valley National Park, California. January 5, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

As seen from Aguereberry Point, first dawn light spills across the lower end of Death Valley.

I have previously photographed from this location high in the Panamint Range and overlooking a vast portion of Death Valley National Park and its surroundings. The view stretches east to 11,000+’ peaks in Nevada and west to the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and great distances north and south to places and features that I cannot identify. My previous visits had all been late in the day, and I had often wondered what the location might be like at the start of the day. So, on this visit to Death Valley, a trip to Aguereberry Point before dawn was on my agenda.

As usual, I awoke well before dawn at my camp site back at Stovepipe Wells. (You can often tell if there are other photographers about – in the dark period an hour or more before sunrise you hear people quietly get up, quickly start their engines, and drive away.) I headed up into the Panamints and turned off at the start of the six-mile gravel road that goes to this point, and arrived just before the first colorful light began to light up the sky – and I was pleased to see that there were some interesting clouds. I have been fascinated by this view over the shoulder of a ridge dropping down toward the Valley above Trail Canyon, so I composed a photograph that juxtaposed this diagonal with the end of the Black Mountains across the valley and the light-filled atmosphere beyond where the very first sun was coming across lower Death Valley.

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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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

Badwater Salt Flats, Evening

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Badwater Salt Flats, Evening
Badwater Salt Flats, Evening

Badwater Salt Flats, Evening. Death Valley National Park, California. March 31, 2009. © Copyright 2009 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of rough patterns in the dried salt desert floor at Badwater Salt Flats, Death Valley National Park.

This is another of the “rediscovered photographs” that I uncovered while reviewing many years of raw files recently. Periodically I go through all of the old archived raw files, partly to cull out a few that I know that I’ll never use, but also because I know that whenever I revisit the old files I discover some photographs that I had forgotten or had never understood at the time I made them. Revisiting the old file archives, I’m sometimes shocked that I passed over certain images.

This one is from the salt flats at Badwater in Death Valley National Park. Technically, this was not shot at precisely “Badwater,” but it is close enough. I was out on the flats in the late afternoon, shooting as the sun dropped behind the Panamint Range. In my view, the best light – with the exception of days when clouds might tower above the Panamints – comes starting right about at the time that the sun passes the line of the ridge as it descends at the end of the day. This takes the incredibly bright and harsh sun off of the playa and provides softer light in the shadow of the range. However, this also presents a problem that almost everyone who has shot here must understand, namely that the illumination by the bright blue sky turns the “white” salt a surprisingly intense blue color. I’ve seen people handle this in a variety of ways: keep the intense, almost gaudy, blue color; do a lot of color correction to get colors that more closely correspond to what we recall seeing; mostly include the sky with its more intense colors; or let the colors go and do a black and white rendition.

Although I’ve “done” this subject in color a number of times, somehow this one seemed to call out for black and white. For one thing, it allowed me to use the interesting shapes of the evening clouds as a dramatic backdrop to the rough and broken shapes of the playa salt polygons. It also allowed me to try an interpretation that focuses on the dramatic potential of the scene.

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.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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

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Playa Surface, Panamint Valley
Playa Surface, Panamint Valley

Playa Surface, Panamint Valley. Death Valley National Park, California. March 31, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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.)

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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.