BadWater

March 20, 2013 • Leave a Comment

The lowest point in North America is 282 feet below sea level and is located in Death Valley National Park at a place called Badwater. Periodically, rainstorms flood the valley bottom of this part of Death Valley covering it with a thin sheet of standing water. Each newly-formed lake quickly evaporates leaving a salt residue on the floor. Repeated freeze-thaw and evaporation cycles gradually push the thin salt crust into hexagonal honeycomb shapes. The evaporation rate is pretty amazing ... it means that even a 12-foot-deep, 30-mile-long lake would dry up in a single year.

The photos here were taken at Sunrise. The first was taken looking North/Northwest. You can see the first rays of the sun hitting the Panamint Mountain range that borders the Valley to the west:

And the same essential view but in a vertical format:

And in this image, you can see more of the Panamints:

My favorite of the morning (soon to be hanging on one of my walls) was this shot looking North/Northeast that shows the range of mountains on the East side of the Valley that slope down to the valley floor. As always, the light attracted me ... the partial red band of light coming from the rising sun's rays as they "bend" over the range of hills is very cool:

A couple of days later, we were on the same road that leads to Badwater but a mile or so to the north, and I took these two shots looking in the same direction as the above shot. The sloping hills are the same as those seen above:

As you can see, a storm was "blowing" through ... always good for landscape images ... and the range of light got bigger and bigger so I decided to create a hand-held HDR shot with 7 consecutive images mashed together into one composite using a 16mm wide-angle lens. I like it! Do you?

Well, that's it for this little adventure! Next week, I'll go back to riding the train in Japan. I hope you enjoyed this little diversion.

Bye for now,

Adam

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