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.
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.
“Richardson Bay, Morning” — Photograph of Richardson Bay from Marin hills, showing Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, downtown Oakland, East Bay Hills, and Mount Diablo in the distance.
This photograph was shot from essentially the same position as the previous one, a black and white photo of the same vista, though with shorter focal length. I used a longer focal length here to try to enlarge to closer elements and leave out some of the stuff along the edges, and to minimize the amount of sky to some extent. I liked the color version of this – it was hard for me to think about giving up the nice overall blue haze, but even more to give up the was of light on some of the green grassy areas at the bottom of the frame.
There is quite a bit of stuff in this image, so let me describe what you see. At the bottom of the frame are hills above Marin City. Beyond the foreground hills you see Richardson Bay, which is an arm of San Francisco Bay near the entrance to Golden Gate. Across the bay we see the hills of the Tiburon Peninsula and beyond that looms the peak of Angel Island. In the distance and across San Francisco the buildings of downtown Oakland are visible through the low level backlit morning haze. Beyond are the East Bay Hills and the furthest peak is Mount Diablo, all the way out past Concord.
The San Francisco Bay and the haze covered East Bay beyond the waters of Richardson Bay.
When I headed over the Golden Gate on this early February winter morning I intended to end up photographing redwoods or along the coast north of San Francisco in the morning before heading south to go back home by midday. I ended up getting distracted by very interesting shooting conditions in the Marin Headlands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and by the time I finished there I didn’t have enough remaining time to carry through on my original plans. But I did have a little time left, so I headed up to this spot along a ridge above Marin City where I know of a great view out over Richardson Bay, the Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, the Bay, past fog-shrouded Oakland, and on to the East Bay Hills.
This is a long lens landscape shot, for several reasons. First, the somewhat longer lens – though 159mm isn’t all that long – compresses distance a bit, both bringing Oakland’s downtown buildings a bit “closer” and foreshortening the very large distances a bit. It also lets me “edit” out some potentially distracting elements close to my shooting position and limit the scope of the image to just those elements that I wanted to include.
