Spring in Death Valley

How does it look?

i like the composition and the color/tones/light. but the close flowers are distracting when out of focus. do you have other versions? jh

Jack:

Thanks for your input. GB

I agree that the close flowers are a distraction--I feel like pushing them out of the way. I have seen only a handful of photos that are successful in keeping subjects sharp from a foot away to infinity, and I imagine they were either taken with lenses that cost more than I earn in a year or they involved a lot of fancy Photoshop work.

Graham, Photo's are personal. Different opinions are the proof. I like the distracting flowers because I can almost imagine myself there trying to move the flower out of the way to get the view which is calling me. Photo's to me are suppose to give thought to my imagination. "The distracting flowers", give me the sense of walking through the fields to reach a clear viewing.

Thanks for the submission,

Galo.

What a beautiful palce for photography.

The distracting flowers make me want more of this beauitiful landscape.

Very nice ... Very well done.

Thanks for all of your comments. My original idea was to capture some of the wildness and transitoriness of the flowers, which live for a very short time in the valley before they succumb to the heat.

Nice moment, probably such bloom will never happen in my lifetime again. While I would prefer more focus immediate foreground, I don't think it's possible under such conditions. As I remember, it's always windy and setting a smaller aperture for more DOF would cause the shutter speed to be too slow. Nice capture of what once was...

Thai, yes, those flowers are gone now. This spot is higher in the hills (a few hundred feet above the bottom of Death Valley) so it is cooler and wetter, and consequently there are (were) way more flowers there. In spring, the valley is a vision of transience. In summer, of timeless heat.