Melting Pot

There are five people standing out on the viewpoint in this frame and I left them in on purpose. They’re there for scale, which is the usual reason. But they’re also wearing five different coats — black, burgundy, red, orange, yellow — and lined up along that edge they do a loose, accidental impression of the hills behind them.

Half past three on a January afternoon. We were in the park with friends, having come down from Logan looking for somewhere warmer, and Death Valley in January is warmer than northern Utah without being what you’d call warm. This was the stop before Badwater for sunset.

I worked the location hard and most of it didn’t survive. Compressed single frames looked busy and had no separation — all that colour with nothing to organise it. I tried a vertical panorama, which I’ve never seen anyone else do there, and it came out fine without being the picture. What worked was going wide: thirteen frames across the whole run of hills, which is what it actually feels like standing at the edge of that lot trying to take the place in.

The colour is only half of it for me. Those hills are sculpted by rain and wind into something with real texture, and I think the frame would still hold up in black and white — which is not something you can say about most photographs whose subject is a palette.

The colours themselves never sit still. Flat light turns them subtle and pastel; the right warm light and they saturate and lift straight off the orange around them. Every version of it is worth looking at.