Isolation with a View

In California along the eastern side of the state line lies Death Valley National Park. Death Valley was established as a National Park in 1994. It features places like Badwater Basin which is the lowest point in the US at 282 feet below sea level. It also features the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, which is where this photograph was taken.

I had several conversations with a friend of mine about going out to Death Valley and photographing the dunes. We must have talked about it for over 1 year really. The problem is that there is only so many months you can photograph out there as the summer is just so hot that you don't want to leave your car. Then in the winter it can get sub freezing temperatures because of the lack of humidity in the air. So planning a trip is hit and miss, trying to get good weather, with clouds and no wind is difficult. But we happened to catch a break!

I was looking for something to shoot and getting bored with what I had been doing lately. So I randomly started checking the weather around several locations I wanted to photograph. It just so happens that Death Valley is on my list of saved places in my weather app. I usually just pass over but that day I saw what I had been looking for. Good temperatures, no wind and clouds but not till later in the day. That was enough for me to make the 2 and half hour trip out there! So I called my friend up and told him to be ready at 2:30am.

We left in the middle of the night hoping to catch the sunrise and possibly so clouds. We had to make a choice, do we head to the dunes first or do we go to Badwater Basin first. We ultimately decided on Badwater Basin first and that was the right choice. There were a few low lingering clouds for sunrise and the mountain in the back still had some snow on it. So we got the shots there that we wanted and then we headed to the sand dunes.

It was here that we had a taste of walking in the soft sand and since it was later in the day, the heat. Luckily for us, it wasn't too hot yet but the jackets we had on previously in the day were just too much eventually. My friend had walked ahead of me and as I was catching up to him at the top of a dune, I looked back and that's when I saw it.... This lonely tree standing out from seemingly nowhere in the sand and this beautiful view of the mountains and clouds behind it. It just captured my attention with how the lines in the sand were leading my eyes to and then past the tree to the view behind it. I set up my tripod and camera to capture this moment while it was there. I first shot wide and it was just too much landscape and not enough of what I was seeing and feeling in the moment. So I zoomed in to isolate more of the tree and the lines in the sand to lead into the view of the background. What resulted was this "Isolated with a View", my newest fine art photograph and April's image of the month!