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Dunes – Silver is a study in light of a photograph I took at the Mesquite Flat sand dunes in death valley National park.
The sun had risen some 20 minutes earlier and now climbed rapidly into the sky, taking with it the side lighting that reveals the beautiful natural curves of sand dunes.
We'd walked about a mile from the car, in the dark. the first half was over flat ground, the last half in the dunes. Walking in dunes is hard going. Carrying a ton of photo gear didn't make it any easier.
A bank of cloud obscured the sunrise without lending any additional interest. A photo-tour group arrived about 15-minutes after us and set up a the ridge of dunes between us and the sunrise. That's what happens in popular places. Sometimes you get the shot and sometimes you don't.
With the sunrise a rapidly fading memory there was not much time left to capture interesting compositions. I doodled around looking for shadows.
That's where this image comes from. It's the sunlight kissing three dune ridges, converted to black and white with a heavy vignette to isolate my subject.
By now, the tour group was heading back to their bus. We hung around for a further 20 minutes, then trudged back to our car and breakfast back at Stovepipe Wells.
Image Capture:
- Canon EOS 5D Mark III
- Gitzo GT3530 Mountaineer Tripod
- Really Right Stuff BH-55 Ball Head
- ISO 100, 1/13 sec at f/32
The GPS data for this image says the altitude of the location was 20 feet below sea level.
The slow shutter speed captures the light surface sand grains dancing in the breeze.
Image Processing:
- Simple contrast adjustments in Adobe Lightroom
- Black and White conversion in NIK Silver Efex Pro 2.0 by DxO
- Additional adjustments in Adobe photoshop
