PHOTOGRAPHING SAND DUNES 

I was lucky to have lived in Colorado for almost fourteen years. One of my favorite subjects to photograph during my years in Colorado was the sand dunes in Great Sand Dunes National Park. Living there allowed me to photograph them at different times of the day and at different times of the year.

Although my examples are of the dunes in Colorado, my tips and advice apply to other dunes in the U.S., such as the white sands in New Mexico and the dunes in California, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Lake Michigan, and North Carolina.

The key is to find different perspectives, angles, times of day, time of the year, and even shooting with telephoto and wide-angle lenses. Some scenes are more conducive for vertical shots; some more so for horizontal shots. Photograph them from the perspective of a photographer; not from the perspective of a vacationer or tourist.

That said, let me share some of my favorite images I was lucky enough to create of the sand dunes in Colorado, some of which rise to eight hundred feet!

I was there in the afternoon and shot on through late afternoon. As I positioned myself near an RV park on the east side of the dunes, I saw a sliver of late afternoon sunlight with the looming dunes in the shadows in the background. I included a tree in the foreground that received some of that sliver of late afternoon sunlight. It also serves as a sense of scale against the huge sand dunes. The effect was surreal.

I was driving away from the dunes after a day of shooting in and around the park. As I distanced myself from the dunes, I saw this awesome combination of plans, dunes, and mountains. I had to stop, pull over, and capture the beautiful layers of nature's art. The dunes seem to grow out of nowhere from the floor of the San Luis Valley. They look big against the valley floor, but pale in size when seen against 14,000' Mt. Herard in the distance. 

During one of my visits, I happened to see this unusual view of the dunes against the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The late evening sun gave the dunes a totally different hue. They looked like mounds of chocolate. 

For this image I got close to the dunes with a wide angle focal length and aimed my camera downward toward the sand at my feet instead of at the dunes, giving me this different perspective. When I got home, I converted the image to black & white. The result gave it a sense that I was on the lunar surface. 

For this next image, I backed away from the dunes and included the nearby creek, the people as they were dwarfed against the dunes, and Mt. Herard in the distance.   

This image really depicts how big these sand dunes are. You can barely see Medano Creek toward the lower part of the image. And, if you look closely toward the center left of the image you can see hikers hiking up the sand dunes. They look like ants against the Great Sand Dunes. They look more clearly in my high-resolution image. This is the color the dunes look in the middle of the day. 

This last image shows the context in which these awesome sand dunes are in. I was hiking down from a waterfall a few miles from the dunes when I saw this scene. It shows the valley floor, the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in the backdrop, and how much land these awesome dunes cover.

So, next time you get a chance to visit any of the sand dunes sprinkled throughout the U.S., think about these tips and go home with some keepers. Have fun!