Death Valley Photography Workshop

The Winter light in Death Valley is amazing. From pre-dawn right thru dusk. I usually like to start the day with a walk out into the Mesquite Sand Dunes about an hour before sunrise.....pick a cool spot to shoot, based on where the sun will emerge from...and wait.

Those first few minutes of direct, low, warm rays cross-lighting the surface of the dunes are unbelievable.

Then, after we've had our fill of sand, we'll head out into the salt.....at Badwater. This involves about an hour's drive, and a short walk on a VERY flat valley floor. The shooting and the overall feeling of this place is truly other-worldly. Just like the sand dunes. It makes for a very eerie morning, and provides some really diverse photo ops.

The video clip below was shot right in the middle of the main salt flat area in Badwater..about a 10 minute walk from the parking area. We used the Canon G-9, which is really a point and shoot still camera, to record the video. The quality suffers from the You Tube compression....but, at least we can do this cool stuff now. The original clip is over 240mb !! And it took over 2 hours just to upload the file online.

If you decide to make the journey to Death Valley....winter is the time to go. It wasn't named Death Valley for nuthin'