Rhyolite is the name of a type of rock, but more importantly it is also the name of a ghost town near Death Valley... You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite or here: http://www.rhyolitenevada.com/.

The visit to Rhyolite is the subject of this post, but the subtext is the use of dark/black to bring focus to the subject.  

By Death Valley standards, the weather was NOT good.  It even snowed on us for a brief period!  And, you can see the highway was wet from some sprinkles.  

Along the way, we stopped and took some shots... the light was spectacular!  If you were standing on the yellow line with me in the photo above and turned ninety degrees to the right, you would see this:

Yes, that's snow on the nearby mountain!

And then turning 45 degrees back to the left from the image above was  my favorite shot of the day:

We arrived in Rhyolite after about 30 more minutes of driving.  I was a bit disappointed as the there wasn't much left of the town.  The most interesting building had a chain link fence around it.  But, opposite it was an old caboose rail car.  What made it interesting was the inside paint job and (of course, the light):

And around the otherside of the building was this 50 gallon Oil drum.  Can you make out the name?

Down the street were the remnants of several old buildings.  It seemed that lots of people found it necessary to leave evidence of their visit!

This building had been moved from somewhere and it looked like it was a temporary site as it was still on its moving bed:

The main street was called Golden ... can you guess what the main product of the town was?

An old, flatbed truck was sitting out in the open in disrepair.  I loved the red dashboard:

Here's the most interesting landscape shot from the town.  What dramatic light:

After maybe 30 minutes in Rhyolite, we headed back to  Furnace Creek.  We stopped one more time just as the sun was disappearing to catch this squall:

When the weather and the light are right, the desert can be extremely dramatic!  We were lucky.

Adam