I was out at twilight on Tuesday evening and I thought I would share some images.
Entrance of the Asplundh Concert Hall at West Chester University. I wanted to shoot this at twilight so I would get mixed lighting conditions–very cool evening light and very warm interior from the incandescent lights.
Day 8 is the last day of our trip. Shooting-wise, it’s going to be a very short day. Our flight out of Las Vegas isn’t until late morning so we have just enough time to shoot sunrise before the two hour drive to the airport. We chose to shoot Dante’s View, that we had scouted out a few days earlier, as it was on our way out of the park.
The full moon would not occur until the next day but it was showing very large on the horizon as we drove to the park. Had to stop and shoot it. Read more »
The other day I ran across a post on Mac Danzig’s blog. Checking a few posts in different categories I found this, Death Valley National Park – A photography guide. For those of you that have been following my series on Death Valley, I thought you might find this interesting.
Since I have only visited the park once I, somewhat arbitrarily, decided to organize my posts around time. This being a guide, organizes the images by geographic area.
Enjoy.
Day 7 is our last full day of shooting for the trip. From the day’s selects I’ve picked 2 from our mid-day scouting and three from another afternoon shoot at Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes.
These two ladies are part of a tour group on a day trip out of Las Vegas. They had chosen to sit and wait while the rest of their group explored Artist’s Pallet. When I saw the green blouse on the lady on the right I couldn’t resist taking a picture because of how well her blouse’s color matched the color in the rock. Read more »
We started off the day back at Zebriskie Point for sunrises. This first image was shot during twilight, before the sun has risen, and there was still a glow on the western horizon. The two black specs on the hills below are two photographers. Since I couldn’t find a composition, with the glow in the sky, and without them; I decided to include them for a sense of scale.
But the magic doesn’t start to happen at Zebriskie Point until the sun is up and over the mountains. The warm color temperature and low angle of light brings out the colors and textures of the hills that line the wash. Read more »
Earlier this week I posted Death Valley–Day 5: Joshua Trees. In it I stated that this week was a twofer. This is the second half of the Day 5 selects; they are from a trip out to the Racetrack Playa.
In the past I had seen pictures of the moving rocks of the Racetrack on several photography forums and have always been intrigued by them. So when I started doing research for this trip, going to the Racetrack Playa was given a high priority. The next to last day we made the long trip out to the playa.
Did I say, “long trip?” That doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s 25 miles of washboard road. It took us over 2.5 hours, each way. I had heard about how bad the road was (many flat tires from the sharp rocks) but had no idea of how miserable of a trip it would be. We had planned the trip so we would be there for sunset so we would have some low light to accentuate the tracks. Because the trip took a lot longer than anticipated I’m very glad we started out early. The good news is we were blessed with some wonderful light while we were there.
In this image I was trying to capture the trail so that it made a S-curve up through the image. Read more »
Since the images in the selects for today fell into two very distinct areas I decide to do two posting for day 5. But before I get to the images I want to share a story about how I got myself into a mental funk and how that affected my image making for the whole morning.
The night before we decided that we would return to Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes for our morning shoot. I then concluded that we could sleep in a bit because the forecast was for clear skies so there would not be great color in the morning and the good light would be not be on the dunes until after the sun gets up over the mountains to the east. When we got up and out to the gas station for gas and coffee it was still dark but about 30 minute later than “normal”. So far so good.
But as we were driving to the park the most gorgeous morning twilight was occurring; everything started to take on a pink glow. The forecast was wrong. It was partly cloudy and the light was awesome. But where we were, there didn’t seem to be anything we wanted to shoot. This glow only lasted 10-15 minutes and by the time we got to some place we could shoot it was over. I started mentally kicking myself over the decision the night before to sleep in. I don’t know why , but all this really bummed me out. So much so that none of my sand dune shots from this shoot make the selects for the day. (And you saw the possibilities in yesterdays images). There are only a couple of pattern shots of cracked mud that made the day’s selects.
Make no mistake about it, part of your personality and mood are expressed in your images. If for no other reason your personality and mood affect what you choose to shoot. If you are in a bad mood then you will most likely not like what you shoot. Another thing to keep in mind is that image can be made almost any time anywhere. You just need to be open to the possibilities. I’m sure if we would have stopped we could have something to shoot and take advantage of the light. Read more »
The alarm goes off and I’m up to look out the window to see if I can confirm the weather man’s prediction, that the wind would stop. And for the first morning that I’ve been doing this the trees outside our room are not blowing. Everything was still. Hooray!! That means for the first time since we’ve been in Death Valley we will get to shoot the sand dunes.
When we got there we realized that all that wind has done some good. It had covered up all the foot prints left by all the previous visitors. So finding interesting subjects with no signs of the hand-of-man would be easier.
Read more »