Alright, hello everybody and good morning from the... hope you can see it, the Great Sand Dunes National Park here in Colorado
This place was not on my list for this trip. It's not on the way to anywhere else either but
given the success, or I believe the success that I had at the White Sands National Monument back in New Mexico
I wanted more! I wanted more dunes and
this was a national park that it was close enough
It's 3 hours away from New Mexico, from Santa Fe, where we are still staying
So it's been a long day because it's only 9:00 in the morning
But I already drove more than 3 hours to get here from New Mexico. I still have to drive 3 hours back
this evening, it's gonna be a very long day
but hopefully I can get a few hours here at this
place to make some good images. The weather as you can see is pretty sunny, bright
Luckily, it's not too hot and
It's a very harsh light, but I don't care anymore
Because the other day at White Sands I thought that the light was very harsh, too
And it was that light that let me create some of the best images
that day, so I'm just not expecting anything
I'm just gonna go there and try to create images with what we got here
And yeah, it should be a fun day!
By the way, before getting started
I've already made a few images on the way here, I like to do that
I like to shoot a lot on the way to locations, because you never know and sometimes I find beautiful
spots on the way to somewhere else
spots that I wasn't expecting to find and I think that
sometimes, the best images come from those moments
so I would recommend you to not pass on those opportunities and stop if you can
just take a couple shots that might turn out to be great images
Okay, so this is the first shot right there, I'm trying to take a long exposure here
I'm trying to do something that I had never really done before, and it's to use 2 ND filters
I've never done this neither with digital nor film
So I'm using the 15 and the 6 stop ND filter, to get an effective 21 stops
It's very necessary here, it's very bright and sunny
I wanna get an 8-minute long exposure to really blur out all those clouds
it's been 3 minutes, 5 more
You might have noticed that I am using f/4 and
you might be wondering if that is gonna get everything in focus from the foreground to the background
I'm not too worried about that, first of all because this is a wide-angle lens
everything farther than 1.5-2 meters
Should be in focus anyway
And the other reason is because I don't mind if the very foreground is blurry or out of focus
I've said this many times
It's something that I actually like and enjoy because for me it's a way for the viewer to actually enter the image
I don't know, this is just my opinion
But when you have a leading line like this, I actually like to have it a little bit out of focus
At the very beginning of that leading line because I think it's easier to the eye
it's something that I do a lot with the Bronica, it's a medium format camera after all and the depth of field can get really
shallow, even when you are using smaller apertures compared to an APS-C camera like this one
So yeah, I like to do that. Probably not the right thing
technically speaking, but I like
the way it looks. Let me know if you like it more, if you don't like it, if you just don't care, whatever
So while I was waiting for that long exposure to finish a cloud just showed up for nowhere and now it's creating all these
shadows and dark areas on the dunes
Along with the bright ones and I'm trying to take advantage of this moment
So I'm gonna keep doing it. Since that camera is busy with the long exposure
I have to use this one, but that's fine because I wanted to use the telephoto lens anyway
I think I got a couple of them that are pretty good, but I'm gonna keep looking for more because the shadows are moving really quick
With the cloud, of course, so be right back
It might not look as much, but I believe these dunes are 500 to 700 foot high
And it's sand, that makes it a little bit harder
but it shouldn't be too hard and
should be worth it
The sand is beautifully smooth here, it has problems though
The first one is that you don't realize how steep it is
I almost fell in there, and the second problem is that it's really hard to focus because the camera can't find
anything where to focus, you know, it's all just tones of
brown sand color. I think it could make, well I know they make for great abstracts
That's what I'm trying to look for here. Even though there are no shadows and
That could actually make the images better because they are going to be very very subtle and I'm looking for
Lines like this one here of this dune. So hopefully it works. But as I said, it's beautiful here
That was not a good idea, so steep
But I kind of made it here, I don't know where to go now
I want to get a view of the mountains
but that's probably not easy that way, gonna go the other way
Just wanted to say that this place is insane and I'm so glad that I came here even if the photos are not good
They should be, by the way, but even if they're not
Look at this
This is so beautiful
tonight I'm gonna have to clean all my camera gear, slowly and carefully, because
I'm sure all my cameras, gear, the bag, everything, my pockets
I mean, everything, it's gonna be full of sand.
I've been thinking about staying until later today until sunset
Until the Sun gets lower in the sky
So it starts creating those shadows, you know
on the dunes are pretty fun to play with, but I don't think I'm gonna do it for many reasons
One of them is because it's partly cloudy and behind me there in the West
It's even cloudier, so I don't know if there is gonna be any shadows tonight when the Sun does get low
Second of all is because I still have 3 hours
to drive back to the AirBnB and it's pretty much the whole time through forests and
there are deer and elk that come out at sunset and
I don't really want to drive in the dark on that road
But the main reason is because I already got to play with the light and the shadows here in these dunes
Because this same weather that will probably not allow for a lot of photography tonight, gave me a lot of
opportunities for abstracts and
stuff like that, because every once in a while well, we got a
cloud and the shadows move and create different patterns and stuff like that
so in a sense it's even better than sunset because at sunset you only have
shadows on one side of the dunes
just behind me, you can see there, that's Star Dune,
That's the tallest dune in North America
It could be interesting to go there just for the sake of doing it
but I don't think that's gonna help my photography today at all, it's gonna just make me more tired and
I'm gonna tell everyone, friends and family, whoever asks, that I actually went there so, don't tell anyone,
I didn't really, but let's say that I did
All right, so just made it back to the car, leaving the dunes was actually
the right decision because it got very cloudy. So there's not gonna be any sunset
and by that, I mean there are not gonna be any shadows to play with later
not only that but I got a notification a while ago, there were a couple
lightning strikes at the other side of the mountains
I don't know if that a storm is coming or not, but it's not something I really wanna find out on the dunes
I had a great time here, I think it was completely worth it
the 3-hour drive. Now, we will see because I need to drive for another 3 back home
So yeah, I think this is it for today. Thank you so much for watching again and see you in the next one
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