Landscape & Nature Photographer — Lightroom Expert & Tutor
This is the archive for blog posts with desert photos. Click on an image or post title to open the post. If you like these, make sure to have a look at the galleries in the Desert Portfolio Category too.
“There are hundreds of paths up the mountain, all leading to the same place, so it doesn’t matter which path you take. The only person wasting time is the one who runs around the mountain, telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.” (Hindu Proverb)
This would probably be good “End Notes” material but I’m enjoying it too much to bury it in there: this video from KBPS, “Desert Seasons“, documents in a, for the observer familiar with this landscape, rather non-chronological order, the seasons in the desert.
During our stay in Shoshone for our 2nd Death Valley Trip, at the end of February, we took a walk at the Amargosa River wetlands area. Now one has to consider the general desert environment to set the right expectations and not jump to immediate conclusions when thinking of “wetlands” here. :) If I’d apply my old German standards for the word “river” and “wetland”, this body of water would barely qualify as a small creek! :)
Now that I’ve added some colors of spring to the blog, I feel like there’s some balance that allows me to add more desert images. :) The following photos are the “part two” from a desert hike in the Coyote Mountains Wilderness in January. In part one, I mentioned that I had set out to explore some spots that looked like potential slot canyons — and this is the result of that exploration.
“A painting or drawing is judged a fake when it turns out not to be by the artist to whom it had been attributed. A photograph — or a filmed document available on television or the Internet — is judged a fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it purports to depict.”
(Susan Sontag, “Looking At War”, 2002)
In my first post from our 2022 Death Valley Trip, I mentioned how at Death Valley, the landscape itself is the abstract. I found the best way to represent this was with the photos that I made from up high, at Dante’s View and Dante Peak*. A couple other locations and the views they offered allowed for similar “abstractions”.