One from the other dunes

From White Sands last January. Canon 5D2, 24-105mm, Lightroom.

Love those ripples! It's not easy finding a large dune like this one without a gazillion footprints on it. How far in did you hike to find this?

Don, this was about 1.25 miles from the nearest parking area. Surprisingly it wasn't hard to find print-less dunes out only that far out, in certain areas away from the sand-sledding areas and main trails. Seems that most visitors to those dunes don't stay very long, and thus don't spend much time getting deep into the dunes.

Also, any footprints can be easily wiped out in a half-day windstorm.

The more difficult part is finding a nicely shaped dune, properly lit.

Cool! Looks a tad soft, but i suppose that could be due to blowing sand.

I love the comp, Nat. This is a little soft for my eye, but I do think this is a good image.

Nice light and and a very graphic shot. I like the slight softness moderating the ripples a little contrasting with the smooth areas of sand.

Thanks for the feedback! The apparent softness in this jpg is due to the resolution and my laziness in downsampling... in the raw capture, in the edges of the ripples, you can clearly see the grains of sand. In a straight export from Lightroom, without any special sharpening for output, that's lost.

I'll see what sharpening settings will produce something that in 9 pixels square more closely approximates what in the original is closer to 81 pixels square.

The resolution of the 5D2 is something I am still getting used to...

I put the new White Sands collection on my site in the Recent Work section, you can see it here