p.2 #2 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
morris wrote:
A delight to view Dan.
Morris
Thanks, Morris. Looks like we’ve both spent some time in the desert recently.
For anyone else who is reading this, it is increasingly looking like this will be a very good years for desert wildflowers here in California. I’ll be heading back in February and possibly again in March.
p.2 #3 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
gdanmitchell wrote:
Thanks, Morris. Looks like we’ve both spent some time in the desert recently.
For anyone else who is reading this, it is increasingly looking like this will be a very good years for desert wildflowers here in California. I’ll be heading back in February and possibly again in March.
With all the rain there has been I can see that. I look forward to seeing your photos as I'm super busy in February and am looking forward to American Oystercatchers returning to Nickerson beach for there mating season and with the increased numbers last year it should be wonderful.
p.2 #5 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
morris wrote:
With all the rain there has been I can see that. I look forward to seeing your photos as I'm super busy in February and am looking forward to American Oystercatchers returning to Nickerson beach for there mating season and with the increased numbers last year it should be wonderful.
Morris
I don't want to say too much, but some out here are speculating about how special this season may be. There are already reportedly lots of plants coming up and in some places they are already starting to bloom.
p.2 #6 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
Ross Martin wrote:
Nice set, Dan! 1 and 12 are my favorites.
Thanks, Ross. I managed to get the first one before the light became... more subtle! Our plans for this morning were diverted a bit when we arrived (well before sunrise) to discover that the road to the spot I had in mind was closed due to flood damage. Se we quickly improvised. I grabbed my gear and hustled out onto the playa. When I started my slog the light was spectacular, but the colorful light on the clouds and peaks began to diminish as the sun rose through thin clouds to the east. I only managed a couple in the intensely colorful light in #1, and after that I had to work with more subtle colors.
On the other hand. the intensity of the colorful light at the location where I made #12 was almost unbelievable. I have some other photographs that I have not shared in which I simply photographed my nearby surroundings in that light, and the intensity of the red color is quite something. There were two challenges in #12. One was simply the huge dynamic range between the brightest portions of the sky and the darkest areas of the foreground mountains., The second was the range and intensity of colors. I actually had to desaturate the sky color a bit in order to make it manageable. In contrast to that the dark shadows, when I raised them a bit, looked far to intensely blue, so it was necessary to do a separate color balance on them. The bottom of Death Valley itself was a bit dark in comparison to that sky, and I had to do some work to pull up enough detail there.
p.2 #7 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
Very nice work Dan. You found the right formula for this series of photographs. You've included some with people in them for scale, which I don't often see you do. Death Valley is a "timeless" place in a greater sense but has little stories of transience all around, like Lake Manly, which make for interesting concepts photographically. BTW #1 and #12 look very similar...
p.2 #8 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
dakel wrote:
Very nice work Dan. You found the right formula for this series of photographs. You've included some with people in them for scale, which I don't often see you do. Death Valley is a "timeless" place in a greater sense but has little stories of transience all around, like Lake Manly, which make for interesting concepts photographically. BTW #1 and #12 look very similar...
Thanks.
You are right that I don’t usually include people in landscape photographs — though I do when I see a good opportunity! For example, the header image at my website and on social media is also a photograph from Death Valley that includes people. And there are others, like this one:
Sometimes including a human figure can crystallize a photograph, both giving it a focal point and inviting viewers to imagine themselves in the place and imagine how it might feel.
As an exercise to understanding how this works, I suggest to people that they try barely covering the small human figure with the tip of a finger and considering how profoundly the effect of the photograph changes!
You are definitively right about “stories of transience” in Death Valley. You can find evidence of human passage in virtually any national park, even in those that contain ostensivel “wilderness,” but they are everywhere in this park — from the scattered evidence of ancient people who lived there for millennia to the much more recent evidence left by miners and prospectors.
BTW, I suspect that the two photographs you pointed out are actually #1 and #13. Those were taken from virtually the same spot and at close to the same time. In both cases I chose the camera position largerly so that I could include the patters of slighlty exposed ground in the very shallow foreground water.
p.2 #10 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
GroovyGeek wrote:
Was the Panamint playa flooded? Or was #3 looking north from Badwater?
I also see that you were on the ridges around Aguereberry, is the road open? I would have expected the recent heavy rainfall to wash it out.
Hi Groovy,
This was back near the end of December, a couple of days before the Christmas Eve Day storm arrived. At that point a pretty good sized Manly Lake had formed and was accessible from the Badwater area. (The road was closed after Badwater, so I wasn’t able to get to the location I meant to visit. I could have walked, but since I had not realized it would be closed there I had showed up too close to sunrise to take the extra time.)
Number 3 looks roughly northwest, up and across the Valley.
I haven’t checked on the current road conditions since just after we came home on Christmas Eve Day. (That was … and adventure!) Emigrant/Wild Rose road had been closed for months until immediately before our arrival, in fact we were surprised to find that it (and some other formerly closed routes) had just been reopened. So we took advantage and headed up into the Panamints for a day.
However, when the Christmas Eve storm swept through, from what I hear the road was re-closed, along with others that had been reopened. I haven’t checked to see if they have been reopened, but my guess is that they probably have. (We’re going back in a few weeks.)
As you may have heard, the prospects for wildflowers are quite good — how far that goodness goes is yet to be seen. Suffice it to say that we’ve got reservations for up to two more visits in the upcoming weeks and months.
p.2 #11 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
Since Groovy Geek resurrected this thread, I thought I add a few more photographs from the visit to Death Valley that I have worked up since I posted the original set: https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1930262/
p.2 #17 · Death Valley in Winter — Lake Manly and More
Monika C wrote:
Dan, how are the wildflowers? I'm planning on heading out there 1st week of March.
Quite good, actually, and more to come. There are desert gold fields on many of the alluvial fans, and some are extremely thick. There are striking spots of color from many other plants, as well. Lots of other hillsides and other places show a whole lot of green plants that are about to bloom.
IT should be great when you are there in the lower elevations.
