You think you’ve seen our mountains, palm trees, architecture, and iconic places. Then you see Gary Dorothy’s photographs and realize you haven’t really seen them after all. The owner of Imageville — his gallery at the same location in downtown Palm Springs for 10 years — has a curious eye that sees the desert from a different perspective. We asked him to walk us through the process of taking some of these images that only he can capture. A sampling of his photography follows the video below.
Gary Dorothy took this photograph of the Chase Bank building on Palm Canyon Drive near Ramon Road with a very wide-angle lens.
“I shot it early in the morning before the fountains were turned on to get the still water with the reflection,” he says.
GARY DOROTHY
Gary Dorothy took this photograph after a winter storm left a large puddle along Indian Canyon Drive south of Interstate 10.
By lying on the wet ground and shooting with a wide-angle lens, he was able to make it look as if the San Jacinto Mountains rise from the edge of a massive lake. The shot on the previous spread is taken with the camera pointed more to the right, capturing the setting moon. Having seen the puddle a day earlier, he drove to the site at 4:30 a.m. and waited for the sun to reach the perfect angle. “First light is the most interesting to possibly explore,” he says.
GARY DOROTHY
Gary Dorothy stood next to the Avenida Caballeros side of Palm Springs Convention Center and pointed his camera straight up to get this shot.
A very wide-angle lens provides great depth of field. “I love the texture that they put on the building,” he says. “I got to thinking about it being roughly related to the texture of the palm trunks. And I wanted to show the sky with these little windows. ... It wasn’t so much about the convention center anymore; it was a study of man and nature, texture, and color.”
GARY DOROTHY
“I’ve shot this group of palms with lots of different skies. I still go back to this setting,” Gary Dorothy says.
This image of the palms along Tahquitz Canyon Way near downtown Palm Springs was taken in late afternoon as clouds were dispersing following a storm. Dorothy stood along the road facing north to capture this composition with the mountain backdrop.
GARY DOROTHY
Gary Dorothy took this shot of a waterfall in the mountains at the far southwest edge of Palm Springs from a helicopter.
The pilot was able to get right across from it, at about 8,000 feet in elevation, so Dorothy could take capture the falls with a telephoto lens.
GARY DOROTHY
The Rancho Super Car Wash sign along Highway 111 in Rancho Mirage is a familiar site, but not as it appears in this image by Gary Dorothy.
“There are limitations what you can do with this sign, because of poles in the way and lots of traffic,” he says. “I had to almost be in somebody’s back yard with my long lens to get this angle.”