This is one of the first images I took at the sand dunes that Thanksgiving Day morning. I had set my alarm for 4:45 and got to the dunes about 5:15 sense it was only 3 miles from my campsite. As I was walking into the dunes I could see the first glimpse of color forming to the east so I hurried through the sand. 😉 I set up real quick hoping I could do a long exposure and capture some of the first colors. One thing I have noticed about desert sunrises or maybe more specifically Death Valley ones is that they can go through at least 3 color phases and sometimes more. What I mean is they can start some early colors and move back to gray and then start another color phase and move back to a lighter gray and then so on. The one thing that was hard about this shot being so long of an exposure was that there is a road that traverses just beyond the dunes and a car would come by (probably another damn photographer) 😉 about every 4 minutes so I took many shots to only get a couple with no headlights in the scene. 🙂
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