Sand Dune and the Milky Way
Sand dune and the Milky Way at night, Death Valley National Park
One night during our Death Valley workshop we went out to the sand dunes. After some searching, I found this wonderful dune with it’s rippled foreground textures. Lighting it was a group project; we all set up our cameras, and took turns lighting the dune from the left and the right, trying to find the right angles to highlight those ripples. Then we set our interval timers to record star trails – and took naps on the sand while we waited for the star-trail sequences to finish. After that the Milky Way was in the right position over the dune, so before moving our cameras we made some more exposures of pinpoint stars as well.
Recording all these exposures of the same composition gave us the option of including either star trails or pinpoint stars in the final image, and having the dune lit either from the left, the right, or both. I liked the pinpoint stars better, and chose to include lighting from both sides. The final image you see here is a composite of three exposures (assembled in Photoshop using the Lighten blending mode): one for the sky, one with the dune lit from the left (colored blue), and one with the dune lit from the right.
