I'm sticking with Death Valley this week. This was a photo shoot I sort of forgot about. It was part of the photo workshop run my Tom Gamache and Van Webster. It took place last November, and I sort of just plunged into the holidays after that. So I am just now sort of rediscovering these photos. Some of you may have seen that I used this week's photo as the new cover photo on my Facebook page, but that was simply a JPEG of the raw file, with not post-processing. I liked it as a raw image, but after working it up in Lightroom, I absolutely fell in love with it.
This shot was taken just after sunrise on the dune field in Death Valley just to the east of Stovepipe Wells. The sun had just come up over the horizon, and as you can probably tell, we were in the midst of the Golden Hour that morning. The already tan-colored dunes picked up the warm morning sunlight and reflected an incredible golden tone. As the dunes march off into the distance, you can see the mountains to the west with shades of deep blue as the sun has yet to strike those areas.
I love this photo because of the color, the depth it shows, and the interesting tiger-stripe patterns shown by the dunes. This shot was, pretty obviously, strongly side-lit. The sun was on my left at an angle a little bit more than 90 degrees to the axis of the lens. And since it was taken first thing in the morning, there is not a footprint in site.
This photo was taken with a Canon EF85 mm f/1.2 lens on a Canon EOS 5D Mk. III. The exposure was set to 1/250 sec at f/61 and ISO 400.
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