Tag Archives: usa

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

Post-Sunset Glow, Amargosa Range

April 24, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Post-sunset light from bright red clouds casts a reddish glow on the Amargosa Range, Death Valley Buttes, and the Kit Fox Hills.

I think this might be the second in what I could call the “impossible color” series from my late-March trip to Death Valley. (The previous image was a photograph of a wash/alluvial fan at the base of Tucki Mountain, photographed on the same evening.) The lurid and unreal colors are not the result of post-processing gone horribly wrong – the light was actually this color for a short period. The sun had already gone down behind the Cottonwood Mountains to the west of my shooting location in the middle of Death Valley not far from Stovepipe Wells. It had been an interesting sunset with the usual increase in warm colors and some attractive clouds in the sky.

What happened next was something that is probably familiar to those who have done a lot of landscape photography, though they recognize that it is not something that you can quite predict. After the sun had set and dusk was coming on, some final light from far to the west, where the sun had probably already dropped just below the horizon, began to strike high clouds above Death Valley. (I could sort of see this coming, since I had noticed increasing color in the sky further to the east.) As this happened, these clouds began to glow with an intense red color that was mixed with the normal bluish tones of dusk light and surface features took on this purple/red glow for just a brief moment before the light faded.

(Those who look very carefully may notice that the sky above and to the east of the mountains is a lot bluer than the mountains themselves. The color had already left the sky to the east, and at this point was coming from the sky directly overhead and to my west.)

I’m still trying to sort out the complex geology of this area and the ways that features are named. The larger range containing these peaks is called the Amargosa Range, though it encompasses many smaller named sub-ranges – I think these might be part of the Grapevine Mountains, roughly in the neighborhood of Thimble and Corkscrew Peaks. A dark peak in front of the main range at the very far right may be part of Death Valley Buttes, and the banded foreground hills are sometimes called the “Kit Fox Hills.”

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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

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.

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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: Northern California, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Construction Lift, Building Interior

April 22, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

I suppose that posting this photograph is the web site equivalent of switching channels – this might be a bit jarring after weeks of Death Valley and other landscape/nature subjects.

I did not quite complete my end-of-year task of going through all of last year’s raw files back in December, so I have been returning to the task bit by bit over the past few weeks. I’m currently working with some photographs from San Francisco, made back in July 2010 when I did some street photography. In old-school style I stuck a 50mm prime on my full frame DSLR and headed out.

At one point I was exploring some waterfront areas of The City and poking my nose into windows of some buildings that were undergoing renovations. Among a few other scenes from this location, I found this one featuring… wait for it!… a piece of construction equipment, posing fetchingly in front of some nice, diffused light coming in from a window out of the frame to the left. I’m still not quite sure why, but I like this image. (Is it perhaps the R2D2-like quality of the orange lift?)

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

Dunes, Mesquite Flat, Sunrise

April 21, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Early morning light striking minor dunes on Mesquite Flat with Cottonwood Mountains wash and the Last Chance Range in the distance, Death Valley National Park.

These dunes are not too far from the main Mesquite Dunes near Stovepipe Wells – they are a bit further east from the better known tallest section of the dunes. The areas of lower dunes provide some very interesting shapes and textures on a smaller scale in some ways that those of the larger dunes. I photographed these with a long lens, shooting from a rise, at a point in time very shortly after the first morning light had struck the sand. The background hills, part of a very large alluvial fan at the base of the Cottonwood Mountains, were in the shadow of a cloud.

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