One of the places we photographed on our trip to Death Valley was the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells. Neat place – but I’ll admit, I struggled photographed the sand dunes.

One of the first things that caught my eye was green plants surviving in the harsh environment. Here’s one of the shrubs surrounded by the sand. You can see the dry hard packed sand in front of the bush.

(c) 2009 Patty Hankins

After photographing more shrubs and patterns in the sand, I hiked to the top of the nearest dune and realized that I could have some fun photographing some of the other photographers on the dunes.

Here’s Bill with his large format camera. I took a look at his transparencies from the Sand Dunes – it looks like he got some nice photos. So when he gets them edited, I’ll post them to the blog.

(c) 2009 Patty Hankins

Next up is David, heading off in search of his next great photograph!

(c) 2009 Patty Hankins

And here’s Brian. For some reason, as the other photographers in the workshop have been posting their photos around the web, I’ve noticed that most of us seem to have at least one photo of Brian off in the distance photographing. 🙂

(c) 2009 Patty Hankins

As we were finishing up photographing at the Sand Dunes, I finally spotted a landscape composition that I liked. By this time, the cloud cover was heavy enough that the surrounding mountains were turning blue in the late afternoon light. So here’s the contrast of the tans of the sands and the blues of the mountains in the distance.

(c) 2009 Patty Hankins

As we left the Sand Dunes and heading for dinner, it started to rain! So we got to enjoy a rainy evening in Death Valley.