Tag Archives: season

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Sandhill Cranes in Flight, Evening

March 8, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 13 Comments

Five sandhill cranes take flight above the Merced National Wildlife Area in evening light.

Migratory birds have always been a subject that I’ve been aware of, but that I haven’t really paid enough attention to. Intellectually I know of their amazing travels between arctic and more temperate regions and I had heard about their appearance in California each winter season. I recall one magical evening a few years back when I began a long drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle late on a winter day, and as I travelled up the Sacramento Valley at twilight I saw huge flocks of birds and thought that I’d like to try to photograph this scene. I’ve seen and photographed a few interesting birds such as egrets and pelicans. But I somehow managed to mostly remain uninformed about their presence not far from where I live.

This season several things came together, seemingly by chance, to encourage me to actually make the effort to get out into California’s Great Central Valley to see (and hear!) the birds. The first was a chance meeting with one of my colleagues in front of the college espresso stand one morning. We were having a casual conversation and she mentioned that she had been out in the Cosumnes River area looking for birds recently. We talked a bit more and I asked her for more information. Being a librarian, she provided me with lots of information, including details of how to find some interesting places out there. A day or two later I found my way out to that part of the Valley and saw, for the first time close-up, the flocks of winter birds… and I was hooked. Within a few weeks I saw posts on the Chuq 3.0 blog where Chuq wrote about his photography of these birds. Then I saw a couple videos at Michael Frye’s blog that captured the “fly in” and “fly out” phases at the Merced National Wildlife Area. (This place is located out on a road that has to have my all-time favorite Central Valley road name: Sandy Mush Road ;-)

Fast forward a week or two and I was returning from shooting for four days in Death Valley, and driving into the Central Valley near Bakersfield. I looked at my watch and realized that I could probably make a small detour and be at the Merced National Wildlife Area before sunset. So I headed up highway 99 (rather than the more usual route up highway 5), found the turn off to Sandy Mush Road, and arrived at the area an hour or so before sunset on an evening when the clouds from a departing cold front lingered. I basically had no idea where I was going, since I had done literally no prior research other than finding the location via my iPhone. As I arrived in the general area I found a large field filled with what seemed like several hundred sandhill cranes. Slowly and quietly I stopped my car and got out on the side away from the birds and began to watch. I never did get to see the fly-in up close (though I could see a huge cloud of birds landing at a pond north of my position) but some of these cranes did depart from time to time, and I was able to photograph this group of the magnificent birds against the clouds in the western sky.

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

Branch, Water on Salt Flats

February 28, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 10 Comments

A forelorn branch sits near pools of reflecting water on salt flats of Death Valley National Park.

After the brief dawn light on the Panamints ended (see the photograph I posted yesterday) and the world went gray over in that direction, I noticed this odd log or branch sitting out on the mud in the salt flats between some of the ponds that streak this section of the flats. While the two minutes of beautiful color on the Panamints had ended, the increasing light was transforming what had been a fairly solid covering of gray into a transparency that revealed interesting layers and patterns of clouds in the morning sky.

I moved a bit closer and made one final sequence of Death Valley photographs before heading back to Stovepipe Wells to take down my camp and start the long drive home. I tried a couple different compositions, including some in which I was closer to the log, but in the end I prefer this one that put some distance between it and me and, I think, suggests the huge spaces that are among of the most compelling characteristics of this landscape.

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.

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.

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