This is a continuation of scouting and exploration in Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada in March of 2023.
The geology here is fascinating. The rocks have interesting variation in texture and color.
If one looks closely, one can just barely pick out hikers on the right side slope of that big dome in the background.
To be continued,
Ken
Sand dunes provide great opportunities for abstract photography. I hope that the few such photographs shared in this post will illustrate such possibilities.
Wind creates large expanses of ripples and repeating patterns in sand dunes, such as those shown above. These can be rendered effectively in color, if the light is favorable. I like monochrome for such photos, since one only needs the light to provide shadows and highlights, meaning one can shoot at times other than just the “golden” hours.
By excluding moving objects, one can use focus stacking quite effectively in such images, getting sharp images over a large depth range.
I really like this photo with the diagonal ripples superimposed on the orthogonal wave in the dune. Obviously, the shadows in the troughs, alternating with the highlights on the crests of the ripples, produces these interesting features.
This is another of my favorite abstracts from the sandhills. In this case, I like the highlight in the depression near the top right of the image and the way the ripples flow into and around the depression.
Another image with interesting, bifurcating, ripple patterns with faint wisps of plant matter (look closely to see these) across the ripples.
The animal track across these subdued ripples adds interest to the pattern. The original color version also shows variations in the color of the sand, producing streaks of color crossing the ripples.
I’m sure some of you have seen images of circles swept into sand by plant fronds or limbs. Here is a variation on that with the lower frond producing long streaks across the sand ripples and the upper frond pecking out an intricate, dimpled pattern along the direction of the sand ripples. To me such natural art work is fascinating. These are also short lived, since the next wind will probably erase these or maybe produce a variation. So, if you see an interesting one, photograph it before it is gone!
Ken
I finally got time to get away for a couple of weeks in March. My destinations were largely determined by weather patterns and the distance between those possible destinations. The first stop was Monahans Sandhills State Park between Odessa and Monahans, Texas. This is a place that I first visited briefly in the 1980s, while on a business trip in the area.
I arrive at the Sandhills about mid-afternoon on a Saturday, where I had reservations in the RV camping area for two nights. My campsite turned out to be in an advantageous site, adjacent to a dune that helped block the prevailing winds. It had been very windy here just a few days prior, which is good, since the wind erases the surface disturbances created by visitors to the dunes. However, I was there during a weekend, so I expected to have to work around the weekend visitors and their tracks in the sand dunes.
The park was fairly busy, as I expected, but the nightly winds helped mute the daily human disturbance of the sand dune surfaces. Initially, I was not impressed by the photographic possibilities in the dunes and many of my photos lived up to those low expectations. However, in the end I think I managed to get a few descent photos. I will let the readers judge the results for themselves and maybe provide some feedback on the posted photos.
It was rather cloudy, especially the first day at sunset, so the late day light was intermittent and not as good as one would have liked for landscape photography. The clouds added drama to the sky, but I never got the brilliantly lit or colorful clouds that I had looked forward to.
It was a bit of a challenge to find large areas of undisturbed sand, but as you can see in the above photo, I managed to find a few such areas. Although, there are muted footprints in the sand in the upper left side of the photo. In the previous photo, there are muted footprints evident in the right portion of the photo. I do not think these are so strongly apparent as to distract from the natural appearance of the sand.
The two trees in this photo are weather beaten and scraggly, but I like the glow in the sand at their base and the alternating dark to light in the sand ripples leading from the base of the photo to the trees. This originally started out as a wider landscape view, but there were distracting elements on the right hand side, so I cropped the photo to remove the distraction.
This sunset photo was taken at the end of my first day in the sandhills. There are notable human infrastructure item along the horizon, some of which I removed or muted via editing, but I could never get all of those features removed without leaving unattractive artifacts, so I left most of them in the photo. These are only visible and distracting, when one enlarges the photo.
This is enough for this post. I will continue with more photos from the sandhills in the next post.
Ken
