Fascinating observation about this photograph: The unaltered contact print of Ansel Adams' famous "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" looks so much like this that I momentarily thought that is what I was looking at.

Shhhh... ;-)

Also, that location is certainly not for most people. It is pretty far out of the way, then down a gravel road, onto a worse gravel road, across a creek (which is probably flowing right now), then a one mile hike across flats to get there. And the times of good light are limited.

In fact, that is one of the secrets. Also, be very early and head to the less busy portions of the dunes. (I shoot in Death Valley a lot, and even on days when the main dunes are heavily tracked I can find clean dunes away from the crowds.)

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… ledges. Here a small tree adds a contrasting bit of green to the sandstone cliff.

2/x
… American Southwest are impressive. But seeing that plants manage to live on these formations is equally so. The variety of ways they eke out a living is surprising — at the bottom of huge holes in the rock, in tiny cracks, along…

I have not been able to sufficiently articulate it (yet), but there is a set of silent, solitary moments in mountains, desert, and at the ocean that stand out in my memory of these places. (I’ve gotten better at recognizing and summoning them over the years.)

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… objectives when we looked up and saw light on nearby peaks! There was apparently a brief break in the incoming clouds.

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… weather there is often beautiful, but it can change rapidly and difficult conditions are also possible — dust storms, rain, and even cold! This was one of those days. We woke up to gray skies and a forecast of rain arriving later that day. We had almost given up on our primary photographic…

Thanks. I’ll try to remember that!

I hear you, Kurt. Among the handful of truly powerful, memorable experiences was a walk I took once from an inland location to the Northern California coast, where I encountered the ocean free of coastside humanity for the first time.

The combination of the Southern California light and those curves sure caught my attention.