“What the flip was grandma doing out at the sand dunes!?”  Ha!  I couldn’t help but think about Napoleon Dynamite while I was out visiting the dunes.  Fortunately, we didn’t have any spills while we were there.  By the way, if you get these references, you’re old!  That movie was released in 2004, which crazy as this sounds, was 21 years ago. 

Anyway – on to the dunes at hand.  I believe it was my second year going out to meet my friend Mark when I decided to take a different route, which ended up taking me past Kelso Dunes.  I had seen these dunes from a plane before, but had no clue what or where they were exactly.  I mentioned them to Mark, and he started telling me about a different set of dunes, which would require a significant amount of effort to reach.  We put it off a few years until finally this year I rented a Jeep so we could safely go out there, and man, what a sight!  Next week I’ll share a wider image from the dunes, and then I will also share some daylight images as well, because the dunes are just so gorgeous (Mark and I are talking about going back in a few weeks actually).  What was interesting and challenging about the dunes, is that as soon as the light went away, the seemed extremely flat.  You really had to push the exposure for the tiny bit of light pollution and ambient light to illuminate any of the ridges in the sand.  Mark and I decided to break out the lights, which really seemed like the way to go to make the scene as dramatic as it had looked during the day.

For this particular scene, I decided to shoot at 50mm.  The other thing I noticed about the dunes was the closer you got to them, the less impressive they appeared on the back of the camera.  You really had to put a little distance between you and the dunes for them to “show up”, so to speak.  The dunes were massive, but most of the rises were fairly gradual, so they looked a bit flat at wide angles.  More on those next week.

This week I also wanted to share a little pet project.  You may see this idea again in the coming months, so I decided to not dedicate an entire post to it.  Anyway, when I got home from the desert and was looking through my images, it occurred to me that I had photographed almost all of the summer Milky Way on different nights.  I decided to see if I could stitch all those together, and just for fun, I through in a foreground from the Joshua Tree junk yard.  Rather than stretching straight up as you see in the image, imagine the truck being in front of you and the image being bent over top of you.  That’s how it would actually be situated.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson