The alarm goes off and I’m up to look out the window to see if I can confirm the weather man’s prediction, that the wind would stop. And for the first morning that I’ve been doing this the trees outside our room are not blowing. Everything was still. Hooray!! That means for the first time since we’ve been in Death Valley we will get to shoot the sand dunes.
When we got there we realized that all that wind has done some good. It had covered up all the foot prints left by all the previous visitors. So finding interesting subjects with no signs of the hand-of-man would be easier.
I worked this composition quite a bit. And never was able to find a way to shoot it the way I was envisioning it. What I was trying to do was a study of light and shadow by featuring the highlight and shadow sides of the foreground dune. The ridge line of the foreground dune leads to all the surrounding dunes in the middle ground that give a sense of vastness, especially with the mountains in the background. I wanted the dune line to come out of a corner of the frame. But if I rotated the camera to the right to get the ridge line to come out of the bottom left hand corner the bright rising sun was also in frame. Making the sky too bright. And if I turned it to the left the bright side of the dune dominated the image. So this is the compromise that I ended up with.
Here is the shooting metadata for this image:
D200 with 12-24 @ 17mm
1/13 sec @ f/13 ISO 100
Matrix, Aperture Priority, Comp +2/3
2 stop soft GND
With this image I was trying to make an implied line with the scrub bushes, the bit of mud sticking through the sand, and the peak of the distant dune. The horizontal framing accentuated that. I would have liked the bottom bush to have been lower in the frame but if I’d have framed it that way there would have been too much sky. So I shot it with the excess at the bottom. I thought about cropping out the little bit of the dune I’m standing on in the lower right hand corner. But decided that it did help the image by breaking up the large area of sand at the bottom.
Here is the shooting metadata for this image:
D200 with 24-70 @ 31mm
1/320 sec @ f/4 ISO 100
Matrix, Aperture Priority, Comp +2/3
2 stop soft GND
With this image I was trying to use a low camera position to emphasize the ripples in the sand running up the face of this dune and to use the lines in the sand to create a sense of flow from the bottom to the top. And when I managed to get myself down low enough (it’s moments like this that make me think I should invest in a right angle viewer) to look through the viewfinder I could not believe my good fortune with the cloud. Notice how the lines in the top of the cloud mimic the lines in the sand. From there, I had to modify the camera position slightly to get some separation between the bottom of the cloud and the top of the dune.
Here is the shooting metadata for this image:
D200 with 24-70 @ 31mm
1/320 sec @ f/4 ISO 100
Matrix, Aperture Priority, Comp +2/3
2 stop soft GND
We had such a good time shooting the Mesquite Sand Dunes in the morning we decided to make this “sand dune day” and make the long trek out to Eureka Sand Dunes for our afternoon shoot.
This is a B&W version of the image I used in my very first post to this blog. You can get the back story for this image in that post. I did not envision this as a B&W when I shot it but when I got home I thought I would see what a B&W would look like.
The strategy that I used for the B&W conversion was to mimic shooting B&W film with a red filter. The red filter would darken the blue sky relative to rest of the image.
What struck me about the image then was how much it abstracted the dune in the middle ground and how much more important that little cloud is to the B&W version than it is to the color version. The cloud being the brightest element and the two dunes emphasizing the cloud (the foreground dune’s ridge line “points” to it and it sets in the “notch” in the middle ground dune) add a lot of depth to the image.
And to be perfectly honest I don’t recall doing anything to make sure that cloud was positioned the way that it is. I think all I was thinking about was getting the ridge line of the foreground dune to line up with the notch in the main dune. The position of the cloud is the result of serendipity.
Here is the shooting metadata for this image:
D200 with 24-70 @ 24mm
1/30 sec @ f/6.3 ISO 100
Matrix, Aperture Priority, Comp +2/3
2 stop soft GND
If you would like to see more sand dune images from Death Valley have a look at my Death Valley Sand Gallery