2024 in Review #3 - Color Nature Photos

January 24, 2025 Sarah Marino

I’m glad I waited until January to pull together my favorite photos since I took this on December 30, 2024 at Point Lobos State Park in California. The park does not open until 8:00 am this time of year—well after sunrise—so photographing it required working with the more direct light instead of letting the limited opening hours keep us from photographing the area at all.

This is my third of three “year in review” posts. If you have not read the first two, you can find the first one with my black and white photos here and the second one with my plant photos here. For this final post, I am sharing my favorite color nature photographs from 2024 along with some reflections on how my photographic process has continued to evolve over the last year.

With 2023 and 2024, my transition from “landscape photographer” to “nature photographer” feels complete. I do not consider these labels to be important but do find them helpful for explaining how the scope of my work has expanded in recent years. Although I still consider myself a beginner and do not have many photos to share so far, I am enjoying bird and wildlife photography more than I ever expected I would, especially since it stretches my technical skills, is a nice way to fill in downtime, and is a good entry point to learning more about a landscape and its ecosystems. As I have broadened my photography interests to include grand landscapes, intimate landscapes, smaller scenes, abstracts, portraits of plants, and now more wildlife photography, my general enjoyment of this craft continues to grow.

2024 in Review #1 - Black and White

January 17, 2025 Sarah Marino

A blooming rock nettle plant in Death Valley National Park — one of my favorite desert wildflowers.

The end of 2024 turned out to be a bit of a whirlwind for me. After we returned from our final destination for fall colors, Zion National Park, I turned my attention to a full refresh of my website galleries. Because I was recovering from a badly sprained ankle, I had a lot of downtime to fill with the tedious tasks of deciding which photos to include, minor reprocessing, keywording, titling, captioning, sharpening, uploading, and then finally organizing. I had planned to get my yearly review posts out before the end of the year but instead shifted all my attention to getting the website refresh in a good place before we headed out to visit family for the Christmas holiday.

Ron: 2024 Recap

December 23, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

Instead of sharing my favorite photographs of 2024 (side note: I have no idea what those are and never will!) I decided to change up the formula and just share photos from this year that haven’t been shared anywhere else yet.

Earlier this year I had three blog posts on Death Valley (Part I, Part II, Part III), and released portfolio ebooks of Iceland and Zion. The following photographs made no apperanace anywhere (most are from Death Valley and our fall trip to the Upper Midwest).

Ron: Death Valley Winter - Just Rocks (3 of 3)

July 16, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

This is the third in a series of three posts featuring my photographs from Death Valley National Park taken over the 2023-2024 winter season (first part here, second part here).

Death Valley is known for many things: the salt flats and polygons at Badwater Basin, the various sand dunes scattered across the park, and the impressive and colorful badlands. Perhaps less appreciated are the mountains, alluvial fans, and canyons spread across the park—and the rocks that comprise them.

Ron: Death Valley Winter - Lake Manly (Part 2 of 3)

June 16, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

This is the second in a three part series of photos from Death Valley taken this winter (see first post here). This post is about Lake Manly.

Lake Manly was a permanent feature in Death Valley until it evaporated about 10,000 years ago and now only forms during periods of heavy rainfall. During Hurricane Hilary in August 2023, heavy rains repopulated the ephemeral lake, and atmospheric river events in January actually raised the water level. During a few wind events in late February, the lake blew to the north before resettling back south and finally fully evaporating by May 2024. Watching the lake move was a surreal experience. Photographer Jerry Dodrill shared a video of the lake actually moving on his Instagram page and you can view it here.

Ron: Death Valley Winter - The Diverse Desert (Part 1 of 3)

June 9, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

Sarah and I spent almost ten weeks in and around Death Valley this winter in our trailer. Our first trip was a quick (for us) week-long visit in December to see the ephemeral Lake Manly before it evaporated. We followed that up with a longer eight-week trip starting in late January, during which our “ephemeral” lake refilled with several atmospheric river events in California. The winter weather was wet, providing many opportunities (lakes, wildflowers, and even fog), but it also closed the roads to many of the park’s further reaches.

(Photographic) Happiness = Reality - Expectations: February + March 2024 Monthly Review

April 2, 2024 Sarah Marino

Ripples form after a flash flood, with the milky flood water filling the depressions. Death Valley National Park.

Well, I missed my monthly update for February and lost all momentum with my weekly blog posts. The reasons: ephemeral conditions in Death Valley, finishing the second edition of our significantly expanded and fully revised Beyond the Grand Landscape ebook, getting a nasty cold, and saying yes to social time in the desert whenever an invitation popped up.

January 2024 Monthly Review

February 6, 2024 Sarah Marino

Light beams shine through heavy storm clouds, illuminating the Panamint Mountains. Death Valley National Park.

I’m sharing a wrap-up like this at the end of each month to help with accountability and discipline. The basic format: an inventory of how I spent the last month with regard to nature photography and our photo business, a casual discussion about the things that are on my mind, and a few non-photography recommendations at the end.

This could be a very short update since I focused on two things over the last month: 1) working on the fully revised and significantly expanded second edition of our Beyond the Grand Landscape ebook and 2) photographing, a lot.

Sarah's 2023 Photography Year In Review

January 1, 2024 Sarah Marino

In this post, I share some highlights from 2023 along with some reflections on my current creative practices, thoughts about the direction of our photo business, some loose goals for 2024, and a short rumination about AI’s potential impact on my chosen career. If you are mostly here for the photos, you can skip ahead to the middle of the post. Before jumping into the text, I would like to thank you for being part of my photo community. I appreciate each of you and wish you the best for 2024!

The Death Valley Landscape and Nature Photography Guide

December 11, 2023 Sarah Marino

The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in the late afternoon on a clear day.

To the uninitiated, it can seem strange to have a photographic obsession with a place called Death Valley National Park. Yet, after visiting for first time, most nature and landscape photographers quickly come to understand the appeal. The scenery is diverse, vast, surreal, and dynamic, all of which are qualities that make this landscape exciting for nature photography. For us, Death Valley holds the only permanent spot among our favorite places, with the other spots rotating based on recent trips we have enjoyed. It fully deserves this honor!

While visiting remote parts of the park is exciting, the more easily accessible landscape photography locations, like Badwater Basin, the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, and Zabriskie Point, are all equally incredible. This makes the park a great option for both short trips and extended explorations. Another benefit: when it is cold and snowy elsewhere, the weather in Death Valley is generally mild, at least at the lower elevations. With Las Vegas only a few hours away, this park is also easy to get to for anyone in North America.

Notes From an Over-Photographed Landscape

September 22, 2022 Sarah Marino

Afternoon shadows fall across the Grapevine Mountains in Death Valley National Park.

PREFACE: This is the introductory essay for ebook portfolios covering my extended 2021-22 trip to Death Valley National Park. You can download these ebooks, for free, here to see the full collection of photographs.

With our Airstream RV trailer, we are able to work remotely for long stretches, so we packed up for the desert and arrived in Death Valley National Park right before Christmas, 2021. We stayed through late February, 2022, giving us about eight weeks in the park. Aside from two weeks of formal work (teaching workshops), I photographed, hiked, or both almost every day. This portfolio is the result of those efforts.

By the time we left to return home, the list of Death Valley canyons I have visited had many new entries, for a total of fifty-four. I can now say I have backpacked across Death Valley’s floor, an experience that makes the incredible vastness of the park feel much more profound than contemplating those same distances from the roadside. The scenery, as always, was endlessly enchanting. Solitude was easy to find. With photography friends coming and going, the trip felt a little like summer camp. As with every trip to this park, the list of new things I want to see is much longer than the list I had when I arrived. With the weather getting increasingly warm in late February, I knew it was time to head home but still tried to convince Ron that we should stay for just one more week. Just one more.

Ron's Recent Work from Death Valley

April 5, 2022 Ron Coscorrosa

After a busy fall in Colorado, the Adirondacks, Vermont, Maine, and Zion we took a needed break before heading to Death Valley in late December with our trailer and staying there nearly 8 weeks. That is a long time in a single place, but like every visit to Death Valley, we only scratched the surface of what is there to see and explore. Most free weekends were spent exploring the many canyons in and near the park. I have now visited over 60 Death Valley canyons - many without names and most with a few surprises.

Canyons (and the rocks within them) make up a large portion of my recent gallery of photographs from Death Valley, I have included a few favorites in this post, but see the full gallery for much more.

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