Death Valley

I've spent the last few days exploring Death Valley with a visiting friend. The light hasn't been very cooperative, but my friend was wearing red, so this made for some natural photo ops! I'm heading back to Death Valley to spend some time shooting desert wildflowers, which are just starting to bloom. And I'm crossing my fingers that the 'Racetrack' playa dries out (it rained recently) so I can once again attempt to make it there!

All below photo taken with EOS 1DsIII.

Photo 1: Mesquite Flat Dunes near Stovepipe Wells
17-40mm lens; Singh-Ray LB warming polarizer & 2 stop hard edge ND grad; mirror lock-up & cable release; Exposure: 0.6 seconds at f/18; ISO 200

Photo 2: Mesquite Flat Dunes near Stovepipe Wells

17-40mm lens; Singh-Ray LB Colocombo polarizer & 3 stop hard edge ND grad; mirror lock-up & cable release; Exposure: 4 seconds at f/20; ISO 200

Photo 3: Mesquite Flat Dunes near Stovepipe Wells

17-40mm lens; Singh-Ray LB warming polarizer & 2 stop hard edge ND grad; mirror lock-up & cable release; Exposure: 1.3 seconds at f/22; ISO 200

Photo 4: Desert Gold wildflowers

17-40mm lens; Singh-Ray LB warming polarizer; cable release; Exposure: 1/80 second at f/10; ISO 200

Death Valley sand dunes

With broken shocks on the van and nightfall approaching, it made sense to camp out for the night and sneak in a morning shoot before leaving the national park for repairs the next morning. As luck would have it, the Stovepipe Wells campground was right next to Death Valley's famed sand dunes. We hiked out before sunrise..... the best dunes were much farther than it looked..... and had an incredible morning of photography out there. The combination of soft light, sand ripples, undulating dunes and mountain backdrops makes this an absolutely awesome spot for landscape photography. It would be hard to take a bad photo there!

Below are some of the results (hope they look ok, because it's difficult to get the raw conversions right when working on the laptop in the van!). All were shot with EOS 1DSm3 body, Singh-Ray LB colorcombo polarizer and 2 stop hard edge ND grads. Lenses were either 24-70 or 17-40. Cable release and mirror lock for every photo.





Raven tracks across the top of the dune: