More Than Skin Deep

Gary Hart Photography: Sunrise Moonset, Mt. Williamson, Alabama Hills (California)

Sunrise Moonset, Mt. Williamson, Alabama Hills (California)
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 100
f/16
.6 seconds

Beauty

In the eye of the beholder, more than skin deep…

We’ve all heard the clichés implying that beauty is both subjective and personal, and like many (most?) clichés, they’re founded in truth. Landscape photography is the glorious pursuit of natural beauty, however we choose to define it. In my mind, the beauty of the subjects I pursue transcends the visual and is rooted in their natural history, their geological evolution, and their interactions with the rest of the natural world. And as much as I try to convey these internal qualities in my images, sometimes I have to use my words. (Hence this blog.)

Speaking of beauty…

Photographing natural beauty starts with identifying relationships, then framing those relationships into something coherent and compelling. Sometimes the relationships are permanent fixtures on the landscape, like the rounded boulders of the Alabama Hills beneath the serrated peaks of the Sierra Crest. Other natural relationships are just as reliable but temporary, like a full moon setting behind a prominent peak. And then there are the completely random relationships, like a beautiful sunrise coloring the sky above the scene you traveled to photograph. Understanding the science underlying all these moving parts amplifies the joy I get from photography, and magnifies the beauty of whatever moment I’m witnessing.

The undeniable beauty of the Alabama Hills and Sierra Crest have drawn me for more than two decades, a draw that has only been enhanced by learning the geology of the area. For starters, I’ve long been fascinated that 14,500-foot Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous 48 states, and it’s almost as tall neighbor Mt. Williamson, are only 85 miles from Badwater—which, at 282 feet below sea level, is the lowest point in North America. Just 125 feet shorter than Whitney, in many ways I find Mt. Williamson even more impressive than its more famous big brother. Unlike Whitney, which is easily lost in the jumble of surrounding peaks, Williamson’s summit stands alone, looming nearly 10,000 feet above the Owens Valley.

How these towering peaks can exist in such close proximity to sunken Badwater has always boggled my mind. Turns out, mighty mountain ranges separated by plunging valleys are distinctive features of the Basin and Range Province of the American Southwest. Over the last 20 million years or so, as the Pacific Plate edges fitfully northwestward relative to the North American plate, large chunks of the Southwest have fractured and deformed. Complex stresses exerted by these shifting plates have forced some of these blocks upward relative to the surrounding terrain, while other blocks have remained in place or dropped.

Another detail I find fascinating about this area is that both the seemingly indestructible Sierra Nevada, and the worn, weathered Alabama Hills, are comprised of the same granite formed deep beneath the surface about 85 million years ago. While the Sierra granite was uplifted and exposed to atmospheric weathering (wind, rain, snow, and ice), the Alabama Hills granite was subjected to subterranean chemical weathering. The resulting differences are very apparent in images that include both.

But if you think 85 million years was a long time ago, consider that our moon is 53 times older. Current wisdom says that the moon formed 4.5 billion years ago, when a Mars-size object (planet? death star?) collided with our still molten planet. Some of the vaporized and molten debris from that collision was reabsorbed into Earth, some was jettisoned into space, and some coalesced into an object that we know now as the moon. You might also be interested to know that at its birth, our moon was much closer to Earth, but each year moves about 1 1/2 inches farther away. But don’t worry, the sun will explode and take us all out before the moon can escape.

The presence of the moon this Alabama Hills morning, while fleeting, was no fluke. Each year I schedule my Death Valley workshop to coincide with the January or February full moon, and we finish the workshop with a sunset and sunrise in the Alabama Hills, a 90-minute drive from Death Valley. The sunrise shoot always includes a moonset.

Knowing what was in store, I positioned myself to align the moon with Mt. Williamson long before the sun arrived. My original plan was to wait until the moon touched the peak, and use my 200-600 lens with a 2X teleconverter to make it as big as possible. But when the sky colored up a few minutes before sunrise (you can actually see the first kiss of sunlight on Williamson), I switched to my 24-105 to include more sky and nearby boulders.

The color you see is courtesy of the very first rays of sunlight, when all but the longest (red) wavelengths have been filtered out. On a cloudless day in the Alabama Hills we don’t see this red light until it touches the crest, and it only lasts for a few seconds before warming to amber. But when we’re lucky enough to have clouds in the west and clear path for the sunlight on the eastern horizon, we enjoy more red, for longer. And while I was pretty thrilled about the color this morning, and was well aware that we needed clouds to see it, I couldn’t tell how thick they were and was concerned that they’d completely swallow the moon. As you can see, everything worked out.

Looking at a picture, any picture, and knowing the natural processes that went into creating that scene, I find truly beautiful. While a lot of the information about my subjects I share has accumulated in my brain over a lifetime of study and experience, I can’t pretend that I can rattle all this info off the top of my head. But I never tire of learning (and sharing), and I think nature photography is the perfect catalyst for this pursuit.