Sand dunes are my favorite landscape to photograph. There are so many contrasting shadows, colors, and shapes, and there are plants and animals that pop up where you wouldn’t imagine any life could be sustained. Spending time in this desert landscape is a humbling and wonderful experience and a reminder of how resilient nature is in even the harshest conditions.

I was recently gifted the book ‘Into the wild’ and came across an amazing description of the desert landscape that moved me. So for my first posting I simply want to share it.

          “The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically, and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical….Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of the sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of a rolling countryside and forest lands…In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes grandly reflecting the earth’s curvature on their concave undersides. The angularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to the clouds as well as to the land…”                      

-Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature