“Work­ing” a sub­ject is impor­tant if you want to get the best pos­si­ble image. When I man­age to remem­ber that my tri­pod isn’t rooted to the ground, and when the sub­ject inspires me, I try a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent angles and com­po­si­tions. Not to men­tion dif­fer­ent focus­ing (my eyes are not what they used to be), depths of field, focus stack­ing, expo­sure stack­ing (aka HDR), etc. As my friends will attest (some­times to their mount­ing frus­tra­tion), I’m def­i­nitely not the kind of pho­tog­ra­pher that takes one or two expo­sures and moves on.

All this “work­ing” usu­ally involves mov­ing around, search­ing for dif­fer­ent views, dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of ele­ments, dif­fer­ent fram­ings. But some­times, as in this set of images, it’s exactly the oppo­site: stay­ing fixed in one spot as the scene itself changes. In this case, I was at White Sands National Mon­u­ment. Small fluffy clouds were sail­ing by, but in the hour or so after sun­rise, they were too far up in the sky to cast shad­ows on the dunes. Even­tu­ally, how­ever, the sun rose high enough, and sud­denly I was sur­rounded by a land­scape that changed dra­mat­i­cally from one moment to the next.

I had been shoot­ing a sim­ple com­po­si­tion of a few pale dunes against a pale sky when, bam, the dunes started chang­ing from white to near black and back again in the blink of an eye. It took me a moment to real­ize what was going on, and then I shifted into high gear. The clouds were mov­ing so fast that all I could do was hit the shut­ter but­ton on my cable release again and again and hope for the best. Then there would be a long spell where sun and clouds failed to inter­sect, dur­ing which I could recom­pose slightly and check my focus. Then wham, another batch. A clas­sic case of hurry up and wait. Over and over again.

Back at the com­puter, it became appar­ent that it wasn’t an issue of which image was best, but which images worked best together as a group or sequence. Some­thing to keep in mind as you work a land­scape sub­ject. For more White Sands images, visit my White Sands land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy gallery.

Tech­ni­cal Data:
Body: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 280mm with 1.4 X Telex­ten­der
Expo­sure: ISO 100, f/22, 1/45 second