Have you ever taken a photograph and when you looked at it later, you couldn’t figure out what attracted you to the scene? If that ever happens to you, the answer might be to move in closer. This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is Close and Closer. For this week’s challenge, I decided to use some examples from Death Valley.
Golden Canyon is beautiful. But what is it that makes it so special?
In the feature shot, I moved in a little closer to the rock layers in the walls of Golden Canyon, creating a much more satisfying photograph of what really attracted me to the scene, the sculpted shapes and pastel colors of the canyon walls.
In the above gallery, I have a few images of Mosaic Canyon. I moved in closer on the upper center image by cropping. The left and right images were made by moving closer and zooming in. I was intrigued by the colors and textures of the rock layers that made up Mosaic Canyon. In this selection though, I don’t necessarily think closer is better, it’s just different perspectives and I like them all.
When it comes to flowers, though, closer is usually better.
With flowers, though, in my experience, closer is usually better unless you are going for the image of the whole field of flowers. The above gallery is a good example of that.
April is not a very colorful month in Alaska. It’s Breakup, that weird season in between winter and spring, and frankly, breakup is messy and not so attractive. Morning ice skating rinks give way to afternoon mud bogs and slush piles . Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Postholing through the unevenly melting snowpack is tiring and tedious. The predominant colors are brown, gray, white, and dead grass yellow. The only pastel is the sky on the occasional sunny day when it’s not raining, sleeting or snowing.
April in Alaska is not very colorful.
Even so, we’re all celebrating. The thermometer actually rises above freezing and soon, soon, soon the snow will be gone and summer will be here. Already the days are long and the twilight lingers.
I miss color.
But I miss color. I miss my wildflowers. Although I’ve spent a lot of winters in Alaska in the past, for over a dozen years I’ve been snowbirding it, heading south to the desert or the West Coast for the winter. It’s a lifestyle I love.
My favorite Sierra campground along the Merced River.
Last year at this time I was in lockdown in Las Vegas, one of the most surreal experiences of my life. The colors of April, found in the wastelands on the outskirts of town, were my salvation during this insane interlude.
Wildflowers from the Vegas Wastelands
Most years, though, I spend the month of March immersed in the wildflowers of the California desert. Then as the flowers move up in elevation in April, I follow along, chasing the bloom.
April Flowers in Death Valley
April is also the month that the cactus are in bloom.
April is when the cactus bloom.
By the middle of the month, heat and wind begin to take their toll on the flowers, and on me. It’s time to go North, time to go home, following the flowers.
Heat and wind are hard on the flowers.
My new favorite place to begin this journey is Carrizo Plain National Monument. The flowers grow thicker here than anywhere else I’ve ever been. It’s something to ponder, that the entire Central Valley once looked like this.
Camping in Carrizo
From there I move on, hopscotching my way along the Sierra’s western foothills, following the path of the Gold Rush on the trail of Highway 49, with a drive through the Yosemite valley along the way.
Wildflowers from the Sierra Foothills
I’ll head west to the redwoods in Mendocino County and enjoy that other color of April, green, for a day or two on my way to Oregon.
Deep in the redwood forest
I might visit friends in southern Oregon in the Grant’s Pass area, an April wildflower delight indeed.
Southern Oregon Wildflowers
From there, time and flowers are both getting scarce. I’ve still got a few days to enjoy the coast on my way to Canada. It’s breakup in Canada, too, though, so I bomb through and reach Alaska right at the end of April – just in time for the first Pasque flowers of the season.
Pasque Flower
Thank you, Amy for this week’s Lens-Artist’s Photo Challenge – the Colors of April. You’ve made me really miss my spring flowers!
A rain event in Death Valley is a very unusual occurrence. After all, it IS the driest place in North America. With only about 2 inches of precipitation a year, rainstorms don’t happen very often. Rain events are even rarer.
I worked at Death Valley for 8 winter/spring seasons. In that time, I witnessed 2 rain events.
Standing at the mouth of Titus Canyon watching the first rainstorm of February 2010 come in over the Panamints
A rain event is much more than just a rainstorm. it has long-lasting repercussions. It can totally transform a landscape, and those transformations are part of the event. These are indeed special moments.
Badwater Salt Flats after the first storm
My first rain event was in 2010. During the winter of 2009/2010, it didn’t rain at all. All the oldtimers said it would be a poor flower year that spring. Too dry.
I spent a lot of time hiking the sand dunes that February because there were many times that the canyons were too dangerous. It rained and rained and rained.
Then February came, and with it, a series of Pineapple Express storms. A Pineapple Express is an atmospheric river formed above the ocean waters near Hawaii. Coming from the south, they dodge the high Sierras, leaving them with plenty of water to dump on Death Valley. We got 3 storms in a row. That February we received an inch and a half of rain. It was the rainiest February in Death Valley’s history.
The sand dunes were transformed into a desert oasis.
It was so wet that pools formed in the sand dunes, the only time I ever saw that happen. It looked like a true desert oasis.
Alpenglow on the Grapevine Mountains reflected in an ephemeral pool
The biggest change, though, was the Badwater Salt Flats. The salt flats were transformed into a lake, filled with about 7 inches of water for miles in every direction. There was so much water a friend went kayaking just for the photo op. With all the fresh snow on the Panamints, this symbol of the driest of deserts became almost alpine in appearance.
The lake at Badwater – deep enough to kayak.
The oldtimers still predicted a poor flower year, though. They said the rain came too late and there wouldn’t be time for the tender seedlings to get a good start before it became too hot.
They were wrong.
2010 turned out to be a good flower year after all.
My second rain event was the big one, a historic one, the great flood event of Sunday, October 17, 2015. It destroyed half the highways in the park. Scotty’s Castle is still closed due to this rainstorm.
It was literally my first day back to the park for the season. I needed to go to Pahrump, the nearest town, 60 miles away, to stock up since I was just moving in. It had been raining off and on for 2 days. My boss told me to be careful, there was flash flooding down by Death Valley Junction.
Badwater in early December 2015
I made it through the water at that low spot alright, but that afternoon the storms came back in with a vengeance. I could hear the radio reports as I shopped, the calamitous beeping that heralded a severe weather alert. When I walked outside, I could see the blackest sky ever out towards the Northwest, contrasting sharply with the brilliant flashes of dozens of lightning strikes.
I tried to hurry home. Things were starting to look serious. I knew I had to hustle to make it before the road was closed at Death Valley Junction. It had started raining, hard, and the thunder and lightning to the Northwest was truly something to behold. A light show, Fourth of July fireworks! I’ve never seen so many lightning strikes. I thought to myself that I was glad I wasn’t at Scotty’s Castle. Things looked really bad in that direction.
Storm over Death Valley Buttes
But they were bad enough where I was. Would I make it in time? The road started to get sketchy. I could see the edges crumbling and I knew for safety’s sake I had to try a different route. They closed that highway less than 10 minutes after I turned around. More than the edges had crumbled.
I thought I’d go the long way around, up north towards Beatty. I was stopped by the sheriff. That road was out, too. I ended up spending the night with a friend, a woman I worked with who lived in Pahrump.
Badwater Road and Telescope Peak January 2016
We headed out in caravan to reach the park early the next morning, in radio contact with the park maintenance crew. There was one route that just might work. There was lots of water running on the road as we crossed washes. One crossing was doubtful. I could feel my little truck slow down and threaten to stall out. I was really glad we were caravaning. In hindsight, I wouldn’t cross water like that again. Within half an hour of when we went through, that road closed, too. But we made it.
The October monthly precipitation average for Death Valley is .07 inches. Death Valley received 1.3 inches of rain in October 2015, nearly all of it from the October 17 storm. That storm caused a lot of destruction to man-made structures and roads. But it also made some amazing changes to the landscape.
Imagine the ground growing thick like this with flowers – everywhere – for miles upon miles
Of course, Badwater Basin once again filled with water. No kayaking this time, though. By the time the road crew had cleared and repaired the road as far as Badwater the water levels were already down too far for that. Mud and debris flows trashed the Badwater Road. The southern part of the road was completely destroyed, the pavement twisted and shredded.
The change that impressed me the most, though, was at Artist’s Drive. A debris flow had completely inundated the main canyon, filling it brim to brim and splashing ten to twelve feet up the walls in places. This layer of mud is now a permanent part of Death Valley’s geological record, a layer of rock that will still show up thousands of years from now. I love to see geology happen!
The main wash in Artist’s Drive filled brim to brim, overflowing with mud from the debris flow.
And then, starting as early as the end of December, the flowers came out. And continued to come out, month after month, all the way to May. They were so thick on the ground you couldn’t take a step without trampling a flower. And they were all supersized, too.
For instance, Desert Five-Spot is usually a shy flower; the plant grows about 6 inches high, with only a few blossoms on each plant. In dry years, it will dwarf into a tiny belly flower only an inch or two high with one blossom. But during the 2016 Death Valley superbloom, I found a veritable plantation of five-spot bushes, all about 3 feet high with dozens of blossoms. One plant had 53 flowers! What a difference a little rain makes!
Desert 5-spot
Although the Artist’s Drive debris flow was the most thrilling change for me intellectually, the wildflower bloom is what struck my heart. It was the ultimate of all the special moments I’ve experienced in my Death Valley rain events.
Art exhibits by Mother Nature – abstracts composed of soft, sensuous, sculpted curves – ephemeral, ever-changing sand dunes. When I saw that Ann-Christine had chosen “soft” as the theme for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, the graceful contour of a sand dune was the first image to come to mind.
When I worked at Death Valley, I got to know sand dunes well. Although only about 1% of Death Valley is covered with dunes, the sand has captured the public imagination and become the iconic symbol of Death Valley to many. The park has 5 major dune fields and a couple of minor ones as well.
Soft, sculpted lines of a sand dune
I learned that even though some dune fields may look similar, each one is unique, with its own ecosystem. Since the dune fields are separated by many many miles of other types of habitat, they may have endemic plants or animals that live nowhere else. Each one is worth a visit.
Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes
The Mesquite Flat dunes are the ones that most people think of when it comes to Death Valley. It’s the largest dune field in the park, and the easiest to get to, right off the highway. Mesquite hummocks harbor an interesting assortment of wildlife. It’s a great place to look for tracks. Go early in the morning for the best insights into the lives of the creatures that come out and play at night after all the tourists are gone. Then beat the crowds and hike up to the top of the tallest dune. Take your shoes off and feel that soft, soft sand, walking barefoot for the final approach. This is another reason to get an early start. The sand can get HOT later.
Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes
The Mesquite Dunes are the best dunes in the park for sunrise and sunset photography. I love these dunes and their firm yet soft sands for meditation and yoga, too. I have a couple of spots I’m fond of that are easy to get to but a bit off the beaten track, for when I need to get away from the crowds of visitors for some alone time.
Mesquite Dunes are a great place to go at night, too. Stargazing there is phenomenal, and nothing beats a full moon hike in the dunes. You might even see some of the critters that leave those footprints behind. Be aware in the warmer months that some of those critters are sidewinders. Look for their weird J-shaped tracks to see if they’re up and about yet when you go.
Go early in the morning to look for tracks.
Saline Valley Dunes
This is the smallest and the lowest of the major dune fields. It has the whitest sand. It’s my least favorite. That’s probably because I have not spent enough time there to get to know them well. I’ve only visited once. It was a windy day, so I couldn’t take many pictures. I was only there an hour when a major sandstorm blew in. I saw it coming and fled.
By the time I reached the crest of the valley, it turned into a real haboob, zero visibility, the kind of sandstorm you see in movies about the Sahara. That may have colored my impression of these dunes.
Patterns in the sand – Saline Valley Dunes
The Saline Dunes are in the difficult to reach Saline Valley. Except on those rare occasions when the road has been recently graded, you will need 4-wheel drive to get there.
Eureka Dunes
The Eureka Dunes contain the tallest sand dune in California, literally a mountain of sand. These sands are special, too. The Eureka Dunes are singing dunes. When the moisture content is just right any vibration – from a hiker’s footprint to a strong gust of wind – may set off a low, rhythmic rumbling throughout the dune, growing and building.
Eureka Dunes – the tallest dune in California
It sounds a bit like a jet engine. But it just may be a real jet engine. Hotshot pilots from the China Lake Naval Base play in the airspace above the Eureka Valley, occasionally flying very low.
The Eureka Dunes harbor an amazing little plant kingdom, including three endemic plants that live nowhere else. The showiest of these plants is the Eureka Primrose. In a good year, the lower reaches of the dune field may be carpeted with these flowers. Alas, I’ve never gotten the timing right to catch that.
Looking down the dune field at Eureka
Part of the reason is the road. Sometimes it’s just high clearance, but at other times all that sand creates some of the worst washboard in the park. It’s far away from everywhere, too, taking many hours of driving whether you come in from the east or the west. This is not a day trip! If you do make it in, there’s a great little primitive camping area with a pit toilet and fire rings available at the base of the tallest dune.
Panamint Dunes
You have to work for this one, but it’s well worth it. There are 5 miles of rough, high clearance dirt road back road to traverse to get near these dunes. And once you get those 5 miles in, you still have a 3-mile hike to reach them. These obstacles keep the Panamint Dunes quiet and untrammeled, some of the best dunes in the park. There may be some beautiful and unusual flowers on the approach, too. I’ve found Lilac Sunbonnets and Broomrape, two of my favorites that I seldom get a chance to see.
Panamint Dunes
Ibex Dunes
They’re not the biggest, or the tallest, or the most popular, but these dunes are my personal favorite. Another high clearance road that can sometimes be 4-wheel drive gets you close, but anyway you look at it you’ve got to hike in a mile to reach these dunes.
It’s a beautiful hike. The Ibex Dunes are full of life. One of the inhabitants is the rare and endangered Mojave Fringe-Toed Lizard. Look for sand verbena and paper-bag bush in the springtime.
Because of the fragile ecosystems, motor vehicle use is prohibited on all of Death Valley’s dunes. The wind may blow your tracks away, but it won’t bring back the plants and animals damaged by your vehicle. So go to nearby Dumont Dunes or Big Dune if you want to tear it up with your dune buggy or dirt bike.
Soft and forgiving, dunes are a wonderful place to explore and play, a great place to bring the kids or commune with the Great All. Check them out the next time you’re in the desert or at the seashore!
One of my favorite ways to pass the cold dark days this winter is to spend time editing my images. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to the intricacies of photo editing software programs like LightRoom and Photoshop. As I mentioned last week, there’s so much to explore!
I have learned how to make my photos better through basic color correction, exposure, and cropping, but I haven’t really gotten to the point of transforming my images into graphic illustrations.
This is the original of the Feature image.
Color Correction
I’ve learned that opening up the shadows and darkening the highlights often makes landscape shots better, but darkening the shadows really makes the colors pop in many flower images.
I’m usually not one to alter my photos into something that wasn’t there – I just want to make it a truer representation of what I saw. But one fun trick I’ve discovered – you can turn a vivid sunset into a moonrise simply by changing the white balance from As Shot to Auto in LightRoom.
As ShotAuto White Balance
Presets can be fun to play with, too.
Correcting Exposure
One thing I’ve enjoyed trying this winter is salvaging total crap pictures that before now I would have just deleted. Photos that are ridiculously crooked or badly exposed, transformed with just a few clicks.
Here’s one that was totally washed out. I was experimenting with long exposures at dusk and this one was too long. The edit looks much better, but the highlights are still washed out. Not perfect, but a good way to salvage a memory.
This image was way too underexposed and really crooked. Should have gone in the trash bin, but I played with it and enjoyed the results.
Cropping
Not only can cropping get rid of distractions in a photo, but it can also mimic the effect of having a lens that gets you a lot closer to your subject. I can’t afford a macro lens or a long telephoto, but occasionally I can fake it –
Sometimes the standard shape of a photo is just not the best way to present that subject. Maybe it looks better long and thin, a panoramic view. Or maybe it works best as a square. This is my favorite photo edit of the week. The shot just needed to be square.
Thank you, Tina, of Travels and Trifles for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, From Forgettable to Favorite.
Photography has been my passion for a very long time. I’ve been practicing the “Art of Seeing”for most of my adult life, ever since I first moved to the mountains when I was 23.
That first SLR was a Minolta SRT-201. I LOVED that camera, so much that I bought the exact same model when the first body wore out. That Minolta was my inseparable companion for 25 years. It documented countless adventures, seasons spent in the Colorado Rockies, the Colorado Plateau, the Sierras, Denali. Hawaii and New Zealand.
Above treeline in Colorado
Photography was my zen, my meditation, my passion. To be still, observe, practice the art of seeing. I don’t know who first came up with that term to describe photography. I think it was David Muench. But to me, the phrase defines perfectly the role photography has played in my life.
I’m auto-didactic. I tend to try to learn everything through the school of hard knocks, and photography was no different. I was an avid reader of Outdoor Photographer magazine. I studied the work of photographers I greatly admired – Eliott Porter,Galen Rowell, and David Muench to name a few. I did attend a couple of workshops through Colorado Mountain College. I read a few books. I even took a mail-order course, but dropped it halfway through as I had no desire to do studio work.
I captured countless adventures with my Minolta.
I wish I had the pix from my Minolta to share with you. A lifetime of beauty. Alas, I am in temporary winter quarters and all my analog work is either home in McCarthy or in my sister’s garage in Colorado. I did find a scant handful of poor-quality scans stored on an SD card that will have to do.
Here’s the disclaimer, though. The original slides are SO much sharper, cleaner and have way better color balance. I really wish I could show you what that old Minolta was capable of.
These scans do not do that old Minolta justice.
It was good stuff. Good enough that people urged me to sell my work. So I did, on a small scale. I was co-owner of an art co-op in Colorado, selling prints and notecards, for a couple of years.
When I started selling my work, I upgraded. Although the Minolta was still my main squeeze, I acquired a used Pentax 645 medium format camera.
I fell in love with photography in the mountains of Colorado.
The Pentax took beautiful pictures, but the film was expensive and the camera was heavy. I took it out for special occasions but not often. I wish I had some of those images to share with you, too, but I don’t.
The art co-op didn’t last, and when it went down the tubes, I decided to go back to Alaska and ended up in Kennecott. The tiny ghost town was so unknown then that I would tell Alaskans where I was working for the summer and even they said “Where’s that?”
Kennecott was unknown when I first got there.
There was only one postcard of the place, and it was a terrible shot. All the visitors asked, “When are you going to get some decent postcards?” I told them “Next year.”
I put my life savings, all $4000 of it , into the gamble. I started Wrangell Mountain Scenics, selling postcards, notecards and prints throughout the Copper River Valley, some taken with the Minolta, some with the 645.
I sold postcards and notecards of the Wrangell Mountains.
I eventually reached a plateau with my business. I needed to step it up a notch if I wanted to take it from a good part-time gig to a profession. And an essential part of stepping it up was to have internet access so I could run a business online. McCarthy was still way too remote for internet service at that time, and I was living there year-round then.
I wasn’t willing to give up McCarthy, so I back-burnered photography and concentrated on being a ranger. I put all my money into land and building a house. I had to make a conscious choice – try to take my photography to the next level and spend a couple of thousand dollars on a professional-grade digital camera, or build a house. I couldn’t afford both. I chose to spend the money on boards.
New camera or McCarthy? I chose McCarthy, the ghost town at the end of the rainbow.
I started working winters in Death Valley to earn money to build my house with. I had a fabulous new landscape to explore, and I desperately needed a digital camera. I couldn’t be satisfied with a plain old point-and-shoot given my background. I needed some control over what I was shooting, but I couldn’t afford a good DSLR, so I gravitated over to high-end point-and-shoots as a compromise.
Since I was no longer trying to sell my work, I was pretty happy with these top of the line point-and-shoots, apart from occasional frustrations. I’ve owned both Nikons and Panasonic Lumixs. I do love how light they are, after lugging a heavy fanny pack full of gear everywhere for half my life. Sometimes, though, you need better control and better lenses.
Death Valley gave me a whole new landscape to explore.
During the 2016 Death Valley superbloom event, I was the park’s main flower lady. I wrote blog posts for the park website and provided photos I took on my days off. The photos became public domain, but I got a credit line.
About a year later, my superbloom photos caught the eye of an interior designer. She wanted to feature some of my work in a redesign she was doing for a hotel in the park. She asked if I had other images like the one she had seen and saved. I sold her some images. I was concerned about quality, since they weren’t taken with a “real” camera, but we made them work and I started thinking about getting back into the photography game.
This photo got me serious about photography again.
I eventually purchased a Nikon D7100. I’ve had it for a couple of years now and still can’t use it right. Too many bells and whistles. I probably should have gotten something simpler, more like my old Minolta, but I decided to go big.
I’m taking tutorials right now, both in Lightroom and on my Nikon. There’s so much to learn. I definitely am feeling my age, and my lack of tech savvy. But I am absolutely loving learning more about digital processing, following the art of seeing with the art of painting with light.
I’m having fun painting with light.
I wish I had a coach, like Patti of P.A. Moed has, someone to look at my work with a sharp but kind critic’s eye and let me know what works and what doesn’t, and offer tips and tricks on how to improve. I have so much to learn! Sometimes I feel overwhelmed.
But it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. Through all the hills and valleys, I’m loving the journey. Where will the next fork in the road take me?
The Nikon lets me get closer and take sharper photos.
Thank you, Amy of The World is a Book, for this week’s Lens-Artists Photography Challenge – My Photography Journey.
