Sand Dune 02boy
Dec, 2020Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken on Kangaroo Island at a location known as Little Sahara. It is about 5kms inland from the south coast and comprises vast sandunes which stretch to the southern ocean.Time
From memory it was taken in the early afternnon. The sun was almost directly overhead.Lighting
It was a marvellous hot sunny day with dark stormy clouds passing overhead at irregular intervals. This made for some great lighting opportunities and the colours were very rich. Being an island, the air was also crystal clear.Equipment
I have a Pentax K5 camera. EXIF was 1/1500sec at f11, ISO 280. Focal length was 40mm on a Sigma EX Asperical IF 20-40mm lens. Hand held. No flash.Inspiration
The contrast between the golden sand dunes and the dark blue stormy sky was incredible but that alone wasn't enough to make the shot. I found myself standing next to some dune grass and wanted to have a focal point of some sort so I positioned the grass in the foreground with the dunes and sky as a background.Editing
There wasn't a lot of PP to do to be honest because the light was so controlled with the cloud cover. What you see (colour-wise) is pretty much as it appeared. After adjusting the contrasts and sharpness slightly to add some clarity, the main PP involved a little crop adjustment to frame the image. Admission, this is a composite. After I had done everything I wanted to do to the image, I still thought it was lacking something, it felt like a blank canvas. I had taken some other shots at the same time of a group of school children hiking through the dunes with body boards which they used to ride down the sand dunes. This one boy was straggling behind the group and I took a shot of him, mainly as a scale reference for later. Being isolated it was a simple matter to mask him out of that shot and place him into the shot you see here. I didn't want him to be too strong an element in the shot so I placed him in the far background just to add that little something...a bit of icing on the cake if you like.In my camera bag
I only have the old Pentax camera and few enough lenses that I can carry all my kit with me anywhere. I have a SIGMA DG MACRO EX 105MM 1:2.8 LENS, a SIGMA EX ASPHERICAL IF 20-40MM LENS and a TAMRON AF LD28-200MM LENS. I have just recently aquired a Pentax 20-70mm lens. All my equipment was gifted to me by my brother in law who saw that I had a passion for photography and thought I could do better if I graduated from my mobile phone. I am eternally grateful to him.Feedback
Sand dunes can be fascinating and rather bland at the same time so you need to look for that little something extra like a 'point of view' or something which stands out and offers a sense of scale (like grasses, people etc). Shape and form are also strong elements in sand dunes and offer great opportunities for minimalsitic images taking advantage of the dune lines.
