gdanmitchell
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 p.1 #10 · Death Valley III (all dunes this time) | |
Thanks.
"The Rat," I can understand your well-earned aversion to sand dunes. ;-)
A few notes on the photographs themselves...
#1: After photographing in wind-whipped conditions more than once this year, it was a pleasure to work in these relatively "boring" conditions — margins-of-the-day soft light and almost no wind. This composition is, in one way in particular, more typical of m approach to landscape photography — I usually exclude the sky from the frame unless something unusual or special is going on there. In this case I filled most of the frame with the dunes, and left a bit of the distant mountains near the upper edge for spatial context. As I often do in my landscape photography, I used a rather long lens for this photograph.
#2: I photographed this scene late in the day, and there are perhaps a couple of things worth mentioning about it. First, on a technical note, I used a set-up that I often use when photographing in the dunes — a 80-160mm Pentax medium format zoom lens on a Mirex adapter on my full frame DSLR. This setup is too much trouble for a lot of subjects, but for dunes (and a few other things) it is really powerful. Tilt does what tilt does... let's me lay down the plane of focus to adapt to the distances between near and far subjects. Being able to do this with a zoom lens gives me more compositional control. Second, I decided to make a very subjective interpretation of the scene with this photograph, and that is one reason I chose to work in monochrome. In many cases we can stretch "reality" further and get away with it in monochrome, and that's what I did here.
#3: As with #4 and #5 I made this photograph near the end of the day, working from very close to the edge of the source of this sand storm. All three were made within a rather short interval of time... because the conditions were quite challenging and because the light was both changing and ending quickly. In this one, aside from the wild sunset colors in the sky, the striking combination of conditions I had that day are visible. The extreme winds were producing a sandstorm emanating from the dunes; the sand was lifted far up into the Amargosa Mountains to the northeast, and overhead virgo was falling from the remnants of a passing weather system.
#4: This was made very close in time to #3, though by this point the sun had set and the pink glow (essentially "alpenglow") above the Amargosa Mountains had replaced the brighter direct sun coloration of a bit earlier. In addition I used a very long focal length to isolate a smaller section of the scene. (I used the 100-400mm lens, handheld, for a lot of these photographs. I had to work handheld in the blowing sand and wind, and this lens gave me the reach to pick out bits of the scene and the focal length flexibility to cover different compositions without trying to change lenses in these conditions.)
#5: This photograph was made a bit earlier, again with the long focal length. It looks the other way — not away from the sun and towards the distant mountains, but right into the blowing sand and directly toward the sun, which was just about to drop below mountains to the west. Hopefully, among other things, it gives an idea of the density of the atmosphere full of blowing dust and sand. (Imagine those clouds in rather rapid motion from left to right.)
One note about photographing in sand/dust storm conditions. These are challenging conditions in terms of protecting your equipment. One strategy I often employ is to work with long lenses, shooting into the clouds of sand/dust from outside or else just within their edges. While I still end up in some fairly strong winds and blowing sand, it is more manageable than if I were out in the center of it. (I've been there, too. Not pleasant, and often nearly impossible to make photographs.) I also tend to put on one lens and leave it, thus avoiding lens changes in these hostile conditions. (Sometimes I work with two cameras, one with a normal zoom and the other with a very long zoom.)
Dan
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