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Canyon and Strata. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.
A desert wash in a winding badlands canyon leads toward contrasting strata, Death Valley National Park.
This juxtaposition of very dark and very light layers in this badlands terrain has long fascinated me. Often the contrasts among the various layers are relatively subtle, even where obvious colors are involved — but here we see nearly the darkest forms right next to some of the lightest. The material in the foreground is perhaps closer to the typical coloration.
There is a lot to look at in terrain like this, especially when viewed from a slight elevation. In some ways the largest forms mimic and expand on the smallest. Tiny irregularities combine to produce larger versions of themselves, and then these combine to produce larger gullies, which themselves collect together to form that great washes that drain the landscape.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Great little location in Glen Etive that yeilded a few images this freezing cold morning, if you look in the small pool of water you can see the last batch of hailstones that had fallen, big critters too!
I found this scene a bit difficult to compose as in Landscape format you are left with a huge bit of empty sky on the left unbalancing everything, switching to portrait has all but eliminated that leaving just enough around the snow capped mountains and giving more balance to the 3 sections of the image.
The rocks formations here are really curious, you can only wonder how this exact scene was created many moons ago, presumably in the Ice Age I'm guessing.
View large and have a zoom around :-)
Lots more images on my main website here - regularly updated
The Cordillera de la Sal was formed millions of years ago. It was an ancient lake, whose bottom was raised by the same movements of the earth's coast that gave rise to the Andes Mountains. Molded over time by the rain, wind and sun of the Atacama Desert, its final form as we know it today has a great variety of natural sculptures, different types of stratifications and colorations varied by the mineral diversity of the place.
Curious layers and colours above northern New South Wales. Mt Somerville (with radar dome) and Mt Tomewin shape the horizon while golden light picks out the residential windows on the hillside of Currumbin Valley. The logic of the colours defies me.
Scotts Peak illuminated by morning light as seen from the Western Arthurs ridge line. We would soon be walking in dense mist again, such are the changeable conditions up there.
Red Strata. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Overlapping ridges of red strata in the Utah backcountry.
Our plans for this day in Southwest Utah were a bit vague. Initially I had in mind perhaps three or four possible destinations, but recent rainfall (which leads to mud, with its pluses and minuses) convinced me that perhaps a drive on a long, isolated backroad might make more sense than a foray into a deep and narrow canyon. Besides, I knew of at least one canyon along the route that was less likely to be muddy, being a bit wider and shallower. So off we went.
One thing about a couple of photographers driving through a fascinating, beautiful place is that… there are a lot of stops. By the time we got to a decent turn-around point on this drive we realized that it was late enough in the day that we probably wouldn’t have a lot of time to explore on foot on the way back. I made a guess that a particular section of narrow canyon might be easily accessible from our route, though I couldn’t be sure since I had not previously visited that canyon. We stopped, walked a bit, and quickly realized that the entry was a bit more complex than we had in mind. We tried another canyon entrance with similar results — given more time we could have gone in, but time was the one thing we didn’t have. But along the route on the way in I had noticed this impressive are of impressively red and impressively eroded strata, and we had time to stop and photograph it before heading on.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
From deep in my archives. Scanned...
Taken in the mountains somewhere in Western Canada. © 2015 All Rights Reserved.
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Apartment building in Chiatura, the mining town in Imereti, West Georgia. Chiatura flourished after the discovery of large reserves of manganese, and grew fast to accommodate the incoming miners. By 1913 the town’s mines produced up to 60 % of the global output. Production was revived after the first World War by the Soviet regime, which nationalized production. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a dramatic impact and, despite efforts to renew production, resulted in economic stagnation.
At Blue Mesa in Petrified Forest National Park, you can count the rings of the petrified logs strewn about, or in a more grand sense of time scale, view the sedimentary layers in the rock formations. The strata located here ranges from 220 (top) to 225 (bottom) million years old.
Switching it up today, and going back to the aerial imagery! It's only taken me 4+ years to share this. I've been working on a bunch of new images, and this is one of them. Im a huge fan of low soft light on badlands and this is a perfect example of that type of light.
I’ve been saying it for years now, drone photography gives such unique perspectives! Everyone wants to fly high and go as high as you possibly can go….which is cool and looks awesome, but those lower perspectives.....these are the perspectives where you have to navigate into tight spaces where the drone has its advantages! Not too high, and not too low!
Steeply dipping beds of Mississippian Madison Limestone mark the entrance to Cottonwood Canyon in the Bighorn Mountains west of Lovell, Wyoming.
About 320 million years ago, during the Upper Carboniferous period, the area of the Cliffs of Moher was much warmer and situated at the mouth of a larger river. Heavy rainfall created great floods that washed sand and mud into rivers flowing to the sea. The sand, silt and mud were dumped at the mouth of the great delta and over time, the sediments became compacted into solid rock which we now know as the Cliffs.
Individual rock layers vary from centimetres to metres. Each layer is a representation of a specific event in the life of the ancient delta as it migrated into the sea.
taken at Tung Ping Chau HK Trail Hike!
Strata is the plural of stratum (the geological formation); for other uses in which it can be used in the singular or plural, see Stratum (disambiguation).
It looks like a badly laid brick wall, but its actually rock strata protruding from the beach at Crackington Haven in north Cornwall.
Eroded Strata. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Colorful eroded desert strata, Death Valley.
Yes, I am still working the morning light on these beautiful eroded formations from Death Valley. (For anyone not already in the loop, I have posted quite a few photographs from this area recently.) The area is remarkable for the diversity of its formations — mostly water-eroded hills but also, here and there, a few rockier structures. The colors make it special, though. In most light they are quite subtle, but at the early and late edges of the day, when the color of the light is warmer, the colors are easier to see.
Timing was the trick for this photograph. I wanted the warm colors of the earliest possible light, but a hill behind my position blocked the light until the sun had risen just a bit. Perhaps you can still make out just a bit of the shadow remnant across positions of the bottom of the scene.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
Rock strata at Sandend harbour; one of the smallest of the many old fishing fishing villages scattered along the north-facing coasts of Moray.
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