Retrospective - Death Valley National Park

Death Valley Retrospective - December 6, 2009....I remember the day like it was yesterday.  It was my first visit to Death Valley National Park.  I was in the infant stages of my photography journey....young and inexperienced.  Quite frankly, I had no idea what I was doing, but for whatever reason, I still felt compelled to venture out into the middle of who knows where to try and capture a "moment".  You see, at that time, I did not fully understand the image making process.  I didn't comprehend personal expression with my imagery, or how to "see" and capture the landscape.  The landscape speaks...it speaks in many visual languages.  It was a language I could not translate with my camera in 2009.  This is still a process that I continue to evolve with each time I turn on my camera.     

Here I am, 13 years later, still thinking about my first visit to the desolate, otherworldly landscape of Death Valley National Park.  As I slowly matured, so did my imagery.  I would say roughly around 2012 is when things starting coming together in terms making semi decent images. By 2014, the lightbulb went off, and I was in full swing with making a half way decent image.  My vision and purpose started to become clear. I was finding myself as an artist and was becoming more deliberate and consistent with my imagery/vision.  I was trying to become more thoughtful with how I captured the landscape. During this period I noticed my image output from the area stalled quite a bit.  It was fine, as I was trying to capture scenes with unique conditions, which we all know doesn't go as we plan sometimes.  Instead of me looking to capture those beautiful open vistas, I decided to start looking for smaller scenes, or scenes that were further away.  These were the smaller, more intimate views of the landscape, the views that we tend to overlook….the quiet landscape.  It's the unassuming, quiet, gentle, and peaceful landscape.  This landscape comes in all types of shapes and sizes.  It has many textures and otherworldly features. The beauty of this landscape is incredible.

As many of you guys know, I enjoy sharing my imagery as a complete body of work. This gallery has been in the making since 2016.  I have made many images from Death Valley during that time, but always felt there was room for improvement and the quality of images that I was making from the area.  I try to curate the images in my galleries to my personal bests, favorites, uniqueness and overall visual flow of the images. I try not to overwhelm the viewer, but yet try to take them on a visual journey.   My vision with this particular gallery is going to be a little different.  As I was capturing these images over the years, and putting the images together in this gallery, one by one, maybe 2-6 images each year, the gallery slowly starting going into a book format...which I'm sure this will come to fruition sometime in the future, and then I realized, this was going to be the direction of this particular gallery.  The images slowly started falling into place seamlessly. Maybe I am way ahead of myself, but this one feels right.  I should have held out for another year, and I could have done a full 10 years worth of images from the area in one new gallery!

My final thoughts with this gallery.  I am HAPPY that I am done with this gallery!  It's been a long time in the works.  Too be honest, I'm not completely 100% happy with this gallery, only because I know there is so much more out in Death Valley to capture, and I could have been a tad bit more diverse with hitting a few other locations.  But overall, I am pleased with everything.  I had about 90-100 new images from 2014-2022.  I cut a lot and kept a lot, and had a bunch I didn't process.  I've shared a maybe 5 across social media during that time frame.  You will see a chunk of dune images in this gallery.  I have an infinite love for those dunes.  I can't even begin to tell you how may times I have photographed dunes, but ever since that winter day in 2009, I have always enjoyed my time playing in the sand box.  You’ll see a handful badland images. The selection of these particular badland images I feel are some of my best in terms of composition and flow, combine that with soft light…..😍 From there you will see a mix of small scenes, with various textures and light. And lastly, there some wider scenes, which I have photographed a bunch of over the years, I purposely only selected a few that I really liked. The others were fine, but wanted to keep the wider scenes to a minimal with this gallery.

Hope you enjoy the imagery here and thanks for stopping by.

DT