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Hey Guys,
This image is a personal favourite of mine for a couple of reasons.
Foremost it’s because of the night I spent shooting it. The sand you see in the shot comes from an area called the “icecream” dunes located as you drive up or down to Cervantes. As you’re going down the road you can spot these stunningly white sand dunes.
They sit like these little isolated islands of white looking ice cream among the bush and shrub. When you finally get out to one and stand on it for the first time you can’t believe just how soft the sand is, it’s like flour! The finest softest sand you’ll ever feel and in some cases 2km’s from the ocean!
I had been fascinated by these dunes for some time and wanted to combine them with my passion of shooting the Milky Way. I did my research and decided on a half moon rising one night to do the shoot.
We headed up for about 6pm, watched the sun set and started to look for compositions, I’d been searching for about 45 minutes with my good friend Abigail when I stumbled upon this formation in the sand, I had to second look it!! I couldn’t believe my luck, these natural lines all leading up to this one point!! Abby was wondering why I was screaming in excitement hahaha, I knew I’d never find another comp like this as these sands shift daily.
So after I’d calmed down I set up and shot my Milky Way images before the moon came along and then waited.
At this point it was pretty dark and then all of a sudden the moon just started to tickle the horizon, as it did the whole landscape just started coming to life, like an alien planet, shadows being cast everywhere with these beautiful lines cutting in and out of the dunes.
It was stunning!! If you ever get a chance to watch a moon rise over these sand dunes, do it!!! We were in awe, it was so beautiful and so alien like with these white sand dunes that I almost forgot hey wait my camera is setup start shooting!!!! hahaha,
So I started firing off my shots, I was very low down in the sand so I was doing series of focus stacked images, the whole time looking at these shadows on the ripples and thinking wow ok this is pretty special.
I spent the next hour or so walking the dunes and just soaking it all in, it was magic and when I got back home to process this I wanted that magic in the shot.
The other reason I enjoy this image is because of the style of Milky Way processing (I hear the purists yelling abuse) hahaha, yes it’s no where near what it looks like normally but check out the rest of my gallery, I don’t process to please others I process to where ever my weird warped brain takes me 🙂 It took me years to develop this technique and can take upwards of 3 hours slowly pushing and pulling colour and detail in and out but I thought it just suited the magical feeling I had when shooting this scene 🙂
So there you go, If you managed to read through my dribble this is why I like this image so much and thanks for viewing it 🙂
Scotty
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