Archive for the ‘Saratoga Springs’ Tag


Scenic ranch country, SW Colorado.

Scenic ranch country, SW Colorado.


Example 1:  Fall in Colorado








Cottonwoods form silhouettes in the fog.




Example 2: Wildflower Bloom







Desert Gold, Death Valley, CA



Example 3: Pupfish Pools



Pupfish habitat: Ash Meadows, Nevada.

Pupfish habitat: Ash Meadows, Nevada.





Reeds at Saratoga Springs, Death Valley National Park, California.

Reeds at Saratoga Springs, Death Valley National Park, California.



Pupfish showing off his iridescent blue flank.

Pupfish showing off his iridescent blue flank.



Saratoga Springs, Death Valley National Park.

Friday Foto Talk: Video Likes & Dislikes   11 comments

Saratoga Springs surprises with so much water in such a dry desert.

Happy Friday!  Here’s another installment of Likes/Dislikes, where I give my totally personal opinion on a trend or issue in photography.  I want to do a series on videography soon, so why not preview that by taking a subjective look at video?  I have so many still images from recently at Death Valley, so forgive me if I share them instead of videos.  So here we go!

LIKE:  The ability to shoot video on most cameras today has changed the way we use our cameras.  I love being able to just switch modes from still to live action on a whim.

DISLIKE:  There is an explosion in photographers switching over to making videos.  It’s trendy, which for me is a reason to view it with some skepticism.  I realize most photographers shoot video simply because it adds profit, and that’s perfectly fine.  But it’s a lousy reason to create something artistic.

Abstract of the reeds reflecting in Saratoga Springs, home of those cute pupfish!


LIKE:  When they’re well done, nature videos are quite educational, even inspiring.  They’re similar to the best of that series Planet Earth.  Videos that feature humans can be eye-opening as well.

DISLIKE:  I have a confession.  I don’t like most videos I see.  I’m not sure of the total reason, but part of it is explained in the next Dislike.  For example, nearly all time-lapse videos bore the heck out of me (probably in the minority there).  When in school I really enjoyed being exposed to time-lapse for educational purposes.  Who doesn’t love seeing exactly how a flower blooms?  But most time-lapse goes for the wow as with still photography.  And it fails miserably.

Line and pattern: Ibex Dunes, Death Valley N.P.

Line and pattern: Ibex Dunes, Death Valley N.P.

LIKE:  Seeing good interesting action is such a different experience than viewing a still.  Good videos are engrossing.

DISLIKE:  When you view a still image you are in control of the experience.  You can look as long as you want and focus on different parts of the picture at your leisure.  Videos on the other hand, control the pace and duration of your viewing.  And before you even watch it you’re being told how long it is.  When the first thing I experience with imagery is the duration of the experience, the life can be sucked right out of it.

The pan near Saratoga Springs features unusually soft and puffy evaporite deposits.

LIKE:  The world is filled with wonderful sounds, and I’ve often lamented the inability to include it in a still image.  I want to create those greeting cards that play a short audio segment when you open the card.  That would be cool!

DISLIKE:  It’s hard to get sound right, even if you have a separate microphone and the gear to monitor and adjust audio.  To make things worse, humans seem to be in love with making noise.  Our world is now filled to the brim with noise pollution.

I can’t count the times I’ve been inspired to record sound in nature only to have Murphy’s Law strike!  I’ll get my microphone out to record some lovely bird call or the wind through tall grass.  And just before I press ‘play’ a plane suddenly drones overhead.  Recording audio at Yellowstone’s thermal features is near impossible without people talking.  You have to go late at night or hike to some off-trail thermal areas.

A desert five-spot blooms near Saratoga Springs.

A desert five-spot blooms near Saratoga Springs.

LIKE:  What about creating videos?  That can be fun and a nice change of pace.  It may even stoke your creativity.  There are several different variations, such as time-lapse and slow-motion.

DISLIKE:  Although shooting natural-time videos can be very enjoyable, making time-lapse videos is like watching paint dry.  You have to sit there with your camera clicking away, automatically taking shot after shot.  Boring!

Most time-lapse shooters do something else while the camera is doing its thing.  They snooze in their cars, look at their phones, and essentially disconnect with their subjects.  And as I mentioned above, I think viewing time-lapses isn’t much better than making them.

LIKE:  Moving pictures can tell you more about the subject than a still photo can.  For example it’s easy to see exactly how graceful a lynx is as it walks across the snow.  A still might hint at that grace, but it’s nothing compared to seeing it in action.

DISLIKE:  Videos can be either distracting or boring, often in the same video.  Sure you can eliminate distracting elements just as with a still image.  But it’s far easier to cut right to the point with a still.  A bad still is easy to ignore.  A bad video may get good, so you’re tempted to stick with it.   You often end up disappointed.

Please add your take on videos in the comments below.  Do you like doing them?  How about viewing?  Why?  Have a fantastic weekend of shooting you all!

Sunset colors over the Ibex dunes, Death Valley N.P.

Sunset colors over the Ibex dunes, Death Valley N.P.

Mountain Monday: Telescope Peak & Death Valley   12 comments

Telescope Peak and the Panamint Range from southern Death Valley's Saratoga Springs.

Telescope Peak and the Panamint Range from southern Death Valley’s Saratoga Springs.

Occasionally I like to highlight a mountain I like for Mountain Monday.  Today it’s Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park, California.  This has long been one of my favorite national parks.  I started visiting when it was still a national monument.  My first visit was a college seminar and field trip.  My second time was freelancing with friends, and we climbed Telescope Peak.

The top is just over 11,000 feet high, and since it was early spring, we waded through hip-deep snow drifts to get there.  After the all-day climb, we drove back down into the valley, took our sleeping bags, and tumbled out into the sand dunes to sleep under the stars.  What a contrast!  An icy morning at 8000 feet, a snowy climb, then sleeping out in balmy weather at sea level.

Snow-capped Telescope Peak has been lifted by the range-front fault over 11,000 feet above the floor of Death Valley.

Snowy Telescope Peak has been lifted by faulting along the range-front over 11,000 feet above the hot desert floor of Death Valley.


Telescope is the highest point in the park and crowns the Panamint Range.  The Panamints are an upraised block of the earth’s crust, lifted along the west side of a fault zone that at the same time dropped Death Valley down.  And down a lot!  The floor of the valley is a few hundred feet below sea level.

But the valley is filled with thousands of feet of sediments that were eroded from the Panamints and other ranges as they rose.  The top of the the bedrock that was dropped down by the fault lies some 11,000 feet beneath the valley floor.  This enormous wedge of valley fill is made of gravels, sands and clays.  But overall it’s quite salty.  There are thick sections of salts of various kinds, including good old NaCl, table salt.

These salt flats at Badwater in Death Valley are just the top of thousands of feet of salt and sediments filling the valley.

Geologists call these types of deposits evaporites because they are formed when large bodies of water evaporate away in a drying climate.  In Death Valley’s case it was a large lake called Lake Manly.  From about 2 million to 10,000 years ago, mega ice sheets lay to the north.  Because of this, the climate was quite wet in the now ultra-dry Death Valley region.  Early hunter-gatherers, recently migrated in from Siberia, were able to spread south because of this climate, which supported a diversity of life much greater than today’s desert does.

But when the ice sheets retreated during inter-glacial periods, the climate grew more arid, and Lake Manly shrank.  Because of how fault-block mountains border almost all sides of Death Valley, often there was little or no chance for the lake to drain in the normal way, via rivers.

The old Death Valley Borax Works, with a heavy-duty wagon.  This wheel is six feet high.

The six-foot high wheel of a heavy duty borax wagon.

Evaporation was (and is) the main way that water left the valley.  Salts that were dissolved in the water grew more concentrated as the lake grew smaller.  A brine was the result, and as the lake grew and shrank many times, often down to nothing, the salts were precipitated out.  They built up layers and layers of evaporite deposits.  The famous 20 mule-team wagon trains transported tons of borax from the borates (a type of salt) mined from the valley (image above).

A close-up of Death Valley’s evaporites (salt deposits).


The current desert climate of Death Valley is one in which standing water from paltry winter rains evaporates rapidly, leaving behind fresh salt.  The salt can take very interesting forms (image above).  The mix of fine muds and salt, combined with repeated wet/dry cycles, can form fantastic polygonal patterns, as the bottom image shows.  Salt is also eroded away occasionally by the Amargosa River when infrequent storms allow it to flow south out of the valley.

The water in the image at the top of the post is really not part of this equation.  It’s fresh not salty, and comes from the amazingly strong Saratoga Springs in southern Death Valley.  I camped nearby one time and captured this view early the next morning.  Saratoga is well off the beaten track and most visitors to the park miss it.  There’s a very cool dune field nearby.

The salt flats in Death Valley form interesting polygonal patterns.

The salt flats in Death Valley form interesting polygonal patterns.  Telescope Peak is just left off the photo.

%d bloggers like this: