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Death Valley, California, February 2007.
all © 2007 KenRockwell.com

This is a teaching gallery. I include all the technical details because people ask. Ignore the technical baloney if you just want to enjoy the images. If you just want the images, click here and keep clicking the Next Photo links.

I made two trips to Death Valley in February, 2007. Most of these shots are from the trip I made with our photo club. Come join us if you're in San Diego!

See my tech data page with even more explicit details about how I set up my camera. Subject descriptions may invoke creative licence.

How to see all these photos: There are two pages, each with about a dozen shots.

You may scroll up and down the usual way, or try my NEXT buttons to save scrolling.

Click the NEXT button on top of each photo to skip down the page exactly and instantly to the next photo.

If, and only if, I've added any commentary in addition to the tech data, I've provided another NEXT button at the end of the commentary.

Be careful: if you accidentally hit a NEXT button above an image (instead of the NEXT button at the end of the commentary text) you'll skip past that image.

These pages are designed to look good everywhere, and especially good in a dim room with your monitor cranked up.

Everything on this website is designed to look great even with dial-up telephone internet, but not this page. If you're on dial-up, hopefully these photos will have loaded by the time you scroll down to them. These images are compressed to the usual Internet standards, but there are a lot of them on each page and they are deliberately screen-filling.

Here's your first link: skip to first image.

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Atlas Imperial Diesel Motor, Borax Museum

Ein riesiger Dieselmotor von Atlas Imperial, Borax Museum, Furnace Creek, California.

Canon 5D, 17-40mm f/4L at 17mm, f/11 @ 1/125, ISO 50, last light of the afternoon, hand-held (tech details). Color as shot, cropped slightly.

For all the years I've been to Death Valley I'd read about a Borax Museum, but never saw it. I usually stay at the Furnace Creek Resort, but I only arrive in the middle of the night and leave for photos before the crack of dawn each day. One day I was wandering around, and discovered that the museum was right next to the rooms! Even better, it was FREE!!! It has a back lot loaded with junk. This is a gigantic Diesel motor that's about ten feet high. Next Photo >>

 

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Trona Pinnacles

Trona Pinnacles, Trona, California.

Canon 5D, 17-40mm f/4L at 33mm, polarizer, cloudy white balance, f/11 @ 1/25, ISO 50, an hour before sundown, hand-held (tech details). Image as shot.

The Trona Pinnacles are on the way to Death Valley.

I used cloudy white balance to make this image more orange.

This photo is a sin which will be dealt with later in Beatty. I used a polarizer, and even at this relatively narrow angle of view there is a dark band in the middle of the sky. This is because the natural polarization of the sky varies with angle, so wide angle lenses looking through a polarizing filter often will darken different regions of the sky different amounts. I got burned; a 35mm lens is usually not wide enough to show this. Next Photo >>

 

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Toilet, Trona Pinnacles

Toilet, Trona Pinnacles, Trona, California.

 

Canon 5D, 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, rectified in DxO software, cloudy white balance, f/8 @ 1/320, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details). Color as shot, some cropping, some removal of color fringes at poop-stack.

Rectification means stretching the original curvy fisheye image back into something useful. Here's the image as it came out of my 5D, and as it looks through the viewfinder:

Toilet, Trona Pinnacles

Image directly from camera.

I used cloudy white balance to make this image more orange.

No sin here: the dark band in the sky is how the sky looks. This system sees such a wide angle that the sky really is lighter on each side. If I wasn't so lazy I would darken the sides of this image to add impact. Next Photo >>

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Trona Pinnacles

Last Light, Trona Pinnacles, Trona, California.

Canon 5D, 17-40mm f/4L at 36mm, cloudy white balance, f/11 @ 1/40, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details). Image as shot.

The color comes from the contrast of the orange light on the tan hills against the blue of the sky. I used cloudy white balance to make this image more orange, which intensifies the rocks and doesn't degrade the sky.

This is 15 minutes before sundown as predicted in tables, which is when the sun goes below the horizon at the beach or in the flatlands. Here the sun sets behind the Sierra to our west 15 minutes before sunset as shown in tables, and you can see the shadows creeping up the face. Two minutes later this was gone.

I don't bother looking up astronomical times in tables anymore. Most GPSs give these times for any location. I use my Garmin 60C. Hit Menu twice, select Sun and Moon, and it reads the sun and moon rise and set times for your current location, calculated at the horizon. Next Photo >>

 

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Cave, Trona Pinnacles

Cave of the Spider People, Trona Pinnacles, Trona, California.

Canon 5D, 17-40mm f/4L at 19mm, Auto White Balance, f/5.6 @ 1/13, ISO 400, 15 minutes after sundown, hand-held (tech details). Color as shot, lightened and cropped slightly.

This cave is big enough to fit a man, if he bends over. These caves are said to be dug by the spider people who inhabit the area. Next Photo >>

 

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Stovepipe Wells Dunes, Death Valley

Dunes, Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley, California.

Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/16 @ 1/20, hand-held, ISO 50, cloudy white balance (tech details). Image as shot.

I'm using a full-frame digital camera, so my 14mm lens is equivalent to 14mm. You'd need a nonexistent 8.5mm or 9mm lens on ordinary digital SLRs to get the same ultra-ultra wide angle.

My 14mm ultra-ultra wide angle lens makes the sand look like you're right on top of it, because you are. I'm only a foot above the sand. The ultra-ultra wide angle lens also is responsible for the sucking effect that draws your eyes into the image from the bottom.

It had rained the previous day, so the surface of the sand was stippled from the rain drops. This gives the grainy texture which shows so well even at this small image size. It rarely rains in Death Valley, so it's unlikely this texture would happen again.

I used cloudy white balance to make the sand more orange. Next Photo >>

 

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Stovepipe Wells Dunes, Death Valley

Mud Dunes, Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley.

Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/11 @ 1/50, hand-held, ISO 50, cloudy white balance (tech details). Image as shot.

 

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Stovepipe Wells Dunes, Death Valley

Dunes, Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley, California.

 

Canon 5D, 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, rectified in DxO software, cloudy white balance, f/8 @ 1/400, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details). Colors and brightness as shot, some cropping.

 

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Hilltop Christian Church, Beatty, Nevada

The Wages of Sin, Hilltop Christian Church, Beatty, Nevada.

Canon 5D, 17-40mm f/4L at 17mm, auto white balance, f/11 @ 1/200, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details).

After dawn at the dunes we headed to Beatty, Nevada for cheap gas and food before heading back through Titus Canyon.

Beatty is a tough mining and gambling town. It's home to at least one whorehouse and a US Government information booth about the nuclear waste dump being built locally at Yucca Mountain.

Just like the town, the churches are direct and to-the-point. Next Photo >>

 

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The Castle, Beatty, Nevada

The Castle, Beatty, Nevada.

 

Canon 5D, 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, rectified in DxO software, auto white balance, f/8 @ 1/320, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details). Some cropping. It took some wrangling in Photoshop to tame the levels.

We were baffled when we saw this from a distance. What was it? It looked old, weathered and abandoned, but it also looked as if it were still under construction. It made no sense: it was part house and part office building and part God knows what. As we approached we saw the home-made plywood crenellations and suspected something fishy.

The best we could figure is that this is a hobby project.

This image was too light. I used curves in Photoshop. I used curve adjustment layers instead of the simple curves command, and used layer masks to paint these effects into various areas. I also darkened the corners (added deliberate light falloff) to draw your attention towards the center. I like light falloff in super wide shots; unfortunately my Canon and most fisheyes are too good and have none. Shots this wide are difficult because one side will tend to be in direct sun (the left side) and the other side is almost 180 degrees away in shadow (the right side.)

Here's the original image as it came from my 5D before rectification in DxO and correction in Photoshop:

Castle, Beatty, Nevada

Image directly from camera. Next Photo >>

 

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Folk Art, Beatty, Nevada

Folk Art Exhibit, Beatty, Nevada.

Canon A550, f/10 @ 1/320, Vivid color mode. Minor cropping and slight green-cast removal.

This was a drive-by shot.

Note the local flavor given by the green space alien head, which is balanced by the magenta fish to the right. This is an homage to Nevada's hosting of the remains of the Earth's first extra-terrestrial guests. These first visitors crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in July, 1947 and were promptly taken by the US Air Force to be stored at Nevada's Area 51 from 1947 through 1975. These remains were moved to a salt mine storage facility in Kansas after this leaked out in the 1970s.

Local Nevada tourism is aided by people still looking for clues at the old Nevada location, Area 51.

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