Death Valley “Winter Light” December 2019 Workshop Results

It may be a while before I get to most of my images, but I wanted to share some of the results from one of my annual Death Valley “winter light” trips last week. Dramatic weather, low angle winter light, water on the salt flats in Badwater Basin, we even saw some nice fireball Geminid meteors, in spite of fairly bright moonlight.

Except for a rare spring wildflower “super bloom,” low angle winter light is probably the most attractive thing to go to Death Valley for, as I describe here: “The Advantages of Winter Light.” This year we enjoyed stunning weather, no crowds for untracked landscapes, and low season lodging rates. It’s amazing to be in a major National Park in a peak photography season while being able to dial the clock back 20-30 years on the crowds!

The fairly rare water on the salt flats was the biggest attraction, and with mild temperatures and little wind, it stuck around for over a week. the salt polygon patterns are caused via thermal expansion cracks in the rock salt, which allow salty water from the shallow water table below to seep up via capillary action. As it dries, it leaves raised polygons of salt. They can be an inch or two high, or sometimes 8-10″ high!

I left the camera running for a while on two consecutive nights. String the images together, and they make a time-lapse video:

I took the risk of starting the sequence slightly bright, and allowing to to go uninterrupted as the light faded quite a bit. The strategy payed off on the Nikon D850, as I was able to recover the latest frames with up to 4 full stops of exposure brightening, plus very high shadow recovery at the same time. I didn’t bother to see what the noise level was, it wasn’t noticeable in the video. Back-lit sensors sure do have great, usable dynamic range! And this was all at enough resolution to be able to do a little rotation, perspective correction if needed, and cropping, and still have enough resolution to produce 8k video, when there’s sufficient demand for it.

As good as this December 2019 trip was, December 2020 may be even better! There are only about 8-12 days without significant moon interference in a given month, so ideal dark sky shooting conditions only come around every 3-4 years or so. In 2020, the peak of the Geminid meteor shower occurs around the new moon date, so we’ll have several nights with a dark background sky to make the meteors stand out particularly well. Here’s a composite of some of the brighter meteors I caught in 2017:

Here are a few more December 2019 images I have so far, I’ll add more as time permits me to post-process them.