Tag Archives: season

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

Dawn Light, Panamint Range and Salt Flats

February 27, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

The first dawn light on the snow-dusted Panamint Range is reflected in shallow winter pools on the salt flats of Death Valley National Park.

This is yet another story of serendipity, I think, though it also does involve some advance work – which should please those who become uncomfortable with the idea that not every landscape photograph results from a slow and deliberate and well-planned process! ;-)

The general location of this scene is along a section of salt flat just below the Salt Creek turnoff from the main highway – it is the first area of obvious salt flats that you come to as you head south towards the Furnace Creek area. One one of my first photographic visits to Death Valley I recall stopping near this location along the road and trying to make a photograph pointing down the length of the Valley. It was not successful, but I’ve always been a bit intrigued by this location where the road has to curve around to the east to avoid this salt flat. A day or two earlier on this trip I had stopped along the road at almost this exact location during the “boring light” part of the day after shooting somewhere else. I had wandered – without any camera gear – down across the wash to a patch of brown salt grass and beyond to the edge of the salt flat. I had noticed a lot of things: the very alien nature of this landscape consisting of mud and caked salt and not much else, the surprising presence of some worms and larvae in this tremendously salty water, the fact that the water seemed to seep from beneath the wash, and the interesting shapes that the water created as it slowly spread along the edge of the salt flat.

Move ahead to this morning, the final one of this trip to Death Valley, and I was up well before first light. I had several ideas about what I might photograph, but had not made a firm decision yet since the weather was something of an unknown. I had a vague idea about heading north up the valley and photographing the first light on the hills along its western edge. I was keeping open the possibility that spectacular light might make it worth while to photograph Zabriskie. But I really didn’t know.

I drove to the Furnace Creek/Scotty’s Castle junction and pulled over to watch the light begin to grow. There were lots of clouds! It looked like a lighter area might evolve straight to my east, but I couldn’t quite see photographic potential in it. To the north things looked pretty bleak. There was some possibility that light could happen way to the south, but I wasn’t convinced. I decided to drive a bit south and see what might happen, and very soon I came back to this place where I had stopped earlier. The light wasn’t very promising – clouds to the east seemed likely to block the sunrise light even though there were some interesting cloud patterns overhead that were starting to become more transparent as the sky began to lighten.

Then I caught just a bit of light on some of the higher clouds above the middle level clouds and I started to wonder if the light just might make it through. I went to the back of the car and grabbed my camera with one lens already attached and mounted it on the tripod. I wasn’t sure if I’d want wide or tele for some of the possible subjects, so I grabbed two additional lenses and stuck them in a shoulder bag and headed down the wash, not really looking up too much, just heading straight towards these little areas of water that I remembered from earlier. As I got close to the edge of the flats I saw that, indeed, a band of sunrise light was coming in below the cloud deck to the east (something I have learned to watch for) and starting to light up the highest peaks of the Panamints. I knew that if this light survived long enough to make it down across the range that it was going to happen fast, so I quickly headed out onto the edge of the flats, more or less ignoring the larger scene and simply looking for an interesting reflecting pool. As I set up – working very quickly now – the first sun lit up the face of the panamints and revealed radiating cloud shapes above. I had perhaps two minutes of this light… and then the small gap along the eastern horizon must have closed up as the light disappeared and went back to gray.

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

Dunes, Cottonwood Mountains, and Dust Storm

February 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 5 Comments

Afternoon winds whip up a dust storm over Death Valley between sand dunes and the high ridges of the Cottonwood Mountains.

Following my typical routine of “get up ridiculously early and shoot until I can’t stand it any longer, hang out during the middle of the day, and then head out for late afternoon and evening shooting,” I had been watching some interesting clouds developing far to the north of Stovepipe Wells during the day and decided that I might head up that way in the evening if they continued to hold promise. After crossing the Valley to the Scotty’s Castle road junction I could see a curtain of virga falling from those clouds to the north, so I decided to head that way.

The wind had been picking up from the south during the afternoon as another weather front approached. As I headed up along the edge of the main valley I could see that this wind was starting to pick up dust and sand from the Mesquite Dunes area near Stovepipe and from areas just north of that. I’m more familiar with the dust being carried south by winds out of the north, so this was a bit of a different site as sand/dust were being picked up from the dunes rather than being deposited there.

The dunes at the bottom of this photograph are not the familiar “main” dunes near Stovepipe, but are instead smaller dunes running north/south up the Valley. While a larger version of the photograph shows some blowing dust on these foreground dunes, the main cloud is coming from further south down the Valley. Beyond the dust and across the Valley are the hills of the Cottonwood range ascending to a ridge that still holds a bit of snow from storms over the previous couple of days, with building clouds above that would bring another dusting on this evening.

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

Winter Evening Sky, Panamint Range, Death Valley

February 25, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Winter clouds fill the evening sky above the eastern slopes of the Panamint Range in Death Valley National Park.

After the long drive from the San Francisco Bay Area I arrived at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley and set up my camp in the mid afternoon and hung out a bit, thinking about the prospects of late afternoon and evening shooting. Because a weather front was coming in (the forecast called for a chance of rain in the Valley and pretty much certain light snow over the passes) the clouds were increasing, in many directions heading past the point of “picturesque” and more towards “socked in.” I was hoping for some evening light – or early rain? – but it seemed less promising as evening approached. In circumstances like these I may come up with a few possible shooting alternatives ahead of time, watch as conditions develop, and make a last-minute decision about where to go based on observations and hunches.

So, late in the afternoon I stopped near Death Valley Dunes and worked to line up some long shots that filled the background of the dunes with the rugged shapes of the Grapevine Mountains, and then headed towards the junction with the road to Scotty’s Castle to try to figure out if the light held more promise to the north or the south. It didn’t look totally promising in either direction, but I thought that I might be able to make something out of the haze to the south as the ridges on both sides of the Valley receded, especially if a bit of glow in the sky turned up right at sunset. So, south it was.

I drove just a little ways in that direction to a point where the road curves a bit towards the east to travel around the northernmost area of salt flats in what I think of as the lower valley – this is the area a bit south of the Salt Creek cutoff. From here there is a fairly open view all the way down to the end of the Valley, and it looked like the clouds were going to evolve in some interesting ways. It didn’t look like I would see a gaudy, brilliantly colorful sunset, but something more subtle and quiet looked like it might happen. As the light began to fade I made a series of photographs whose subject was largely the sky and the atmospheric recession along the Panamint Range (shown here) on the west side of the Valley and the mountains just beyond Furnace Creek.

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

Tioga Lake, Late Spring

February 22, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Late spring at icebound Tioga Lake below Tioga Pass with Mammoth Peak and the Kuna Crest beyond in afternoon light.

I made and shared a slightly different photograph of this scene last summer, but when I did my annual end-of-year traverse of the year’s raw files I returned to the original set of images and wondered how I missed this one. In a lot of ways it is similar to the one I selected earlier, though the foreground light and shadow patterns are a bit different and, more importantly, I like the position of the clouds in this one more than what I had in the original. So, there are now two versions of this scene floating around…

After several fairly dry years in California, the winter of 2009-10 produced much more precipitation, as rain in the lowlands and as snowpack in the Sierra. Because of the heavier snow, Tioga Pass opened just a bit later than average, and when it opened there was still a lot of snow in the high country. Since this afforded a rare chance to cross the Yosemite Sierra in conditions not usually seen by drivers I made it a point to get up there as soon as the road opened.

On the drive there was snow along almost the entire length of Tioga Pass Road, and in many places it looked more like winter than like spring. At the same time, it was spring, and the melting of the snowpack was fully underway. While lakes like Tioga Lake, as seen in this photograph, were still ice-covered… the ice was thinning quickly, and everywhere the melting snow was creating creeks and cascades. The high country, especially at the elevation of the road, was filling with water – water in ponds, water in overflowing lakes, water in rivers, water in cascades and waterfalls. I was waterfalls along the road in places where I had not even suspected that there were creeks!

This photograph shows Tioga Lake, just east of and below Tioga Pass, the eastern entrance to Yosemite. The pass itself is in the low saddle just above the meadow ascending the hill at the end of the lake. Beyond, and inside the park, is massive Kuna Crest with white, snow-capped Mammoth Peak in full sun at the right end of the ridge.

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