For this week’s Lens-Artists Photography Challenge, Patti invites us to explore empty spaces in our photography. Empty spaces can draw more attention to our subject, as it does in this wildflower photo.
In wildlife photography, leaving a lot of empty space in front of your subject gives them room to move.
Or empty spaces can be used in landscape photography to evoke a mood or illustrate the vastness or wildness of a place. Possibly my favorite place to capture emptiness in landscape photography is Death Valley National Park.
Empty spaces can accentuate the vastness of a landscape.
Including a lonely road can evoke a mood of solitude and remoteness.
Since many of the most exciting nameless canyons in Death Valley are reached by hiking up an open wash, these wide open spaces create a sense of adventure and exploration in me.
But by far my favorite empty spaces to photograph in Death Valley are the sand dunes.
With five major dune fields contained within the park, there are a lot to choose from.
Emptiness can not only emphasize distance, it can also highlight the sheer massiveness of certain landforms.
Empty spaces don’t need to bring attention to a particular subject. They can also be used to bring attention to something more ephemeral, like color, as shown in the sunset colors of the feature image, captured in White Sands National Park. Empty spaces also make great palettes for abstract photography. Here is my favorite meditation image, a celebration of emptiness.
Death Valley has been on my mind a lot lately. A huge storm in late August dropped over a year’s worth of precipitation in one day. When the park finally reopened 2 months later, the basin was still filled with water,
If there are enough little rain events in the upcoming weeks to keep seedlings moist, that big storm could lead to great things for 2024. It IS an El Nino year. Dare I hope? Could we actually have a superbloom? It’s possible. Stay tuned. I’ll be watching the weather closely. I’m keeping my dance card open, not committing to any housesits for 2024 yet. I’m hoping that instead, maybe this year, I can once again follow the flowers.