The photograph was taken during a workshop in Death Valley in February 2023. On that day, the conditions were perfect for photographing sand dunes: the sun was shining, and at the same time a strong wind was blowing through the dunes. We could not have wished for a better day.
I photographed almost everything with my Sony 100–400 mm lens to compress the landscape and capture several layers of dunes. I had to take the sun out of the frame as I wanted to avoid stray light and lens flares. With such a vast number of sand dunes, it’s not easy to find a visual anchor point when you zoom out the lens a little more. In this case, I felt I’d found something the eye could focus on.
There were two aspects of this image that I was keen to emphasise during post-processing: light and depth. I boosted the light source coming in from the right whilst simultaneously lowering the level of blacks in the background to enhance a sense of depth and create a stronger atmosphere. Both steps are an essential part of my post-processing workflow, which is inspired by „North West Pacific“ photographers such as Marc Adamus and Ryan Dyar. I just published a book about post-processing in landscape photography in the Rheinwerk Verlag.
