Death Valley

Ever since I visited Death Valley some sixteen years ago I’ve felt called to come back. It’s such a brutal, rugged and extreme place that it completely mesmerizes my soul. As a friend put it beautifully when she saw some of my pictures, “it looks exactly how I would imagine a different planet”. This time we came with the specific goal of taking pictures of the dunes under a full moon, which turned out to be a bit of a challenge.

The day before full moon there was a massive dust storm that forced us to hunker down inside the van instead of executing our plan of scouting the dunes for good vantage points and experimenting with pictures under an almost full moon. Then, on D-day the storm had apparently subsided, so we got everything ready to spend the evening and a good part of the night on the dunes: we drove half an hour from our campsite, packed photo gear, jackets and blankets, food and water… and as I was ready to open the van’s door, it was dust hell all over again in an instant.

We killed time playing games and eating our food. After sunset, even though it was still very windy, the visibility improved drastically, so to the sand dunes we went.

The moon provided enough light to guide us through the dunes, but not enough to see a thing through my camera’s electronic viewfinder. So, after setting up the camera on top of the tripod I had to point it more or less towards the scene I thought wanted to capture, switch to manual focus and trust that my distance estimations were right, take a 2-second, low quality shot at very high ISO, inspect the resulting picture in the monitor to figure out how I wanted to change the framing (zoom in or out, point the camera more up or down, to the left or to the right), try again — making sure there was no shrubbery in the foreground, because the wind would render it totally blurred — and repeat the cycle several times. Only after getting the scene framed more or less as I wanted I’d take a higher quality 20- or 30-second long exposure, which could be ruined by a gust of wind that would move the tripod or produce a river of sand in front of my subject. At that rate it was about three or four mostly lousy compositions per hour.

In essence, it turned out to be a lot more difficult than anticipated, and the results were only moderately successful, but it was fun and the trip overall was just glorious. And we did get back to the sand dunes on our last day to enjoy a beautiful sunset on a windless day.

Note: with all my tech savviness (and after countless hours) I haven’t been able to get this WordPress blogging tinghy to not lower the image quality. It’s so frustrating! So, click here if you want to see these pics presented at higher quality (don’t bother if you’re on a phone, though).