Wrapping up my first Death Valley project

[mentalcrisis00]

Well here I am finally nearing the end of my first bunch of work from Death Valley. I posted back in March with only a handful of photos and figured I'd remake my thread seeming the work has changed and grown quite a bit since then. I have all the film developed now and just in the process of scanning and post processing, I'm hoping to send it to galleries next week. Right now I have 30 scanned and edited digitals that I'm pretty happy with and these are the picks of the litter.

For me this project was about exploring a place that was totally new to me. And I've thought a lot about what this work really means, I'm still not quite sure. I just remember standing there whilst clicking the shutter and being overwhelmed by the enormity of the landscape itself. In awe of the areas primal and desolate nature.

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Left to Right - "Morning Palette", "Landscape within a Landscape", "Burnt Oasis", "Dry Riverbed"

Any suggestions on titles for the work would be appreciated, or suggestions of any kind. I'm horrible at naming bodies of work. Thus far I've been able to come up with Death Valley, 2011, Seeing Death Valley, Death-scape, you can see why I need help with that. I usually go for literal or scientific names and always feel the need to jazz them up and they just end up being dumb or cliche.

[mentalcrisis00]

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Left to Right - "Southwestern Briar Patch", "Words from the Past", "Splitting Scape", "VW Out of Gas"

[mentalcrisis00]

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Left to Right - "Ubehebe Panne", "Ubehebe Crater with self portrait", "Turtle Scales in the Sand", "Ripples in the Sand"

[mentalcrisis00]

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Left to Right - "Dawn over the Dunes", "Ghost Town", "Layered Landscape"

Some lost a little shadow detail during compression if you want to see the higher res versions you can see them at my website.

[darr]

Hey Ray,
Nice work. You could always name your pieces by Numbers; Death Valley #1, #2, etc.
Your piece, "Burnt Oasis" is very beautiful. Good luck with this project.

Kind regards,
Darr

[mentalcrisis00]

Thanks I noticed alot of photographers do end up taking a literal naming convention, or just naming it Unknown. I haven't decided whether I'll take the descriptive or literal route yet. These photos are up on my webpage too and they're higher res and easier to look at. You have to click the images in the gallery and then click them again to get the full resolution by the way.

Burnt Oasis is one of my favorites as well, I think it's probably the best shot I got on the entire 13 day trip. It was one of those chance shots, the black palm trees caught me eye as we were driving down the main road. I screeched to a halt and jumped out, the ground was nothing but ash instead of sand and every piece of vegetation was charred. Amazingly almost all the burnt up bushes and trees were leafing up again. So you had these black trunks with green leaves on them. I don't think I saw anything else quite as amazing as that. Except maybe sunset over the Mesquite Dunes, I'm already planning my next trip there.

[threemilesfinal]

Great work! I too really enjoy "Burnt Oasis".

lol coming up with titles is a pain in the arse. i too usually stick with "House on a Hill", "Tree hanging off a Ledge" etc when titling things.

[Jim Ewins]

There was an interesting article in the WSJ last week or the week before on titles. Galleries love titles, I seek emotion and beauty in the image - the title means nothing. BTW the signature on the image IMO detracts. The makers name does nothing for me.

[mentalcrisis00]

The watermark is only for my web images, that doesn't go on prints. If I sign a print it goes on the back.

[Vaughn]

Missed these in June -- I think I was out backpacking.

Good looking images! You did cover some ground!!

Vaughn