Death Valley
 

Got up at 2AM this morning and drove to Death Valley for the sunrise.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4021/...80a70dd95e.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1361/...b28ecb1d2b.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1341/...0dbdc279a4.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1093/...72cfac3928.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1417/...2dab0df75a.jpg

Beautiful... especially the last one with the rippled dune crest.

Thanks GreyWolf. One more...

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1251/...38984f5a00.jpg

Those are absolutely spectacular! I love your work fnaqzna

amazing composition and saturation.... i thought the bloom season was over? i was going to go a few weekends ago but my understanding was that the season was ending! also how's the heat right now?

Thank you. :)

Thank you. At 5AM, I was in a t-shirt. Probably gets pretty hot in the afternoon. I wouldn't wait much longer.

---------- Post added at 11:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:33 AM ----------

Here's a bit of creosote:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4046/...db6c05a03d.jpg

I wouldn't be able to drive out there until next next weekend. It'll probably be too late to see any of the wildflowers.

good lord, man...stunning.

I especially love the 4th one in. :)

Is there a particular setting you use to capture night-time photos and render them looking as clear as day, sandman/fnaqza, or is this a post-editing (read as: photoshop) feature? I have just come to notice your statements about how some of your images are exquisitely-detailed star/sun-scapes, but then you tell me you took it at 2am/2pm, so it kind of equates to "mind=blown" for me, in that you can filter out these luminescent eye-deal-absorbing colors with absolutely no light at all, (or too much, depending) but what comes affixed to your camera.

At night, there's no secret. It's just a long exposure using a tripod. These in this thread were taken in the morning at sunrise. It's a two hour drive to get to Death Valley, so we were up a 2AM, out the door, and on the way.

Most DSLRs (that I know of) won't do more than a thirty-second exposure without another timing device. With film, we just used a cable-trigger that could lock down in bulb and timed manually. I use a Nikon MC-36 trigger for the D300.

Oh... and I post-process everything. Usually adjust exposure, curves, levels, pop the color a bit, etc.

Yeah, I noticed about 5 seconds after I submitted my post that you said you "drove" there around 2 a.m. to capture these photos at sunrise. Still, though, I do recall one or two other instances about how you mentioned the "converting nighttime shots to look as though they were caught with extraordinary brilliance"-type images, and in a way that is true, but at the time, I just assumed it was the sun that provided you with that.

Thanks for the explanation, fnaqzna; I don't know when it happened, but I have just fallen in love and seek out every form of true "context" & reason there is, just to understand it a bit better.

Stunning.