Back in the Valley of Death

For a number of reasons I’ve been spending a lot of time in the desert recently. This time I returned to Death Valley National Park in order to continue working on a body of work started for my recent assignment for National Parks Magazine. The above image was taken on a return visit to the Racetrack Playa, the large flat lakebed known for it’s “sailing stones,” an example of which you can see in my previous post showing the published spread. As always, my goal when visiting a frequently visited location is to find a unique way to shoot it. More so when I have the luxury of shooting for myself with no deadline or expectations. We arose early that morning to catch the last of the moonlight and the first daylight. Unlike my last trip though, there were no clouds in the sky, leaving me with a bunch of images I considered fairly ordinary. After shooting we returned to our campsite for breakfast. On the way out we decided to hit up the Grandstand, a large set of boulders situated on the lakebed, despite that the sun had now risen high, leaving us with us with contrasty light not usually preferred by landscape photographers. We were fortunate while there to be the only ones around other than a lone, barefooted and shirtless man wandering around the lakebed. This was the element I needed to show the scale of the environment in a way that a picture of a rock can’t. To me it also made the scene look otherworldly. Having found this I was satisfied enough to move on to the next location, the Eureka Dunes. Neither I nor my friend Matt, also a photographer, had been to this particular set of dunes before. On my previous trips the roads leading to the dunes, found on the north end of the massive park, had been closed, making accessing them, by going all the way up and around the exterior of the park, impossible given my time restrictions at the time. This time we had a Jeep and the direct road was open, so we made a point of getting there. Unlike the centrally located Mesquite Dunes, which cover a wide expanse, but are only 100 or so feet tall, the Eureka Dunes, nestled against a set of mountains walling off the Eureka Valley, reach 700 feet at the tallest dune. They are also much less trafficked due to the difficulty of accessing them and their distance from the center of the park, where generally everyone stays. Surprisingly though, after my initial awe at their massiveness and beauty, I found myself quickly bored of photographing them. These too have been photographed by a large number of very talented landscape photographers, and again there were no clouds in the sky to lend the scenes any drama. Looking for something different I began to notice that I could find all of these abstract, perfectly defined lines as one dune overlapped another and began shooting very abstract images focusing on only the lines and shadows. Suddenly I found myself working on a sort of a fine art project-within-a-project that kept me entertained until the last of the evening light had gone. I plan on eventually offering a series of fine art prints from the shoot, which I may add to if I get the chance to return again in the fall. I’ll also be adding a finished edit of the overall Death Valley project to my site very soon.