Finding Simple Compositions in the Sand Dunes | Minimalist Landscape Photography

I enjoy shooting landscape images in the sand dunes. Once again, it was time to hit the road and explore a different set of sand dunes about 2 hours north of Perth, this time near Cervantes. For this adventure I was accompanied by fellow landscape photographer and YouTuber Richard Lefroy.

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Go here for Richard’s video of this trip –

We took some time to explore the sand dunes before the sunset. There wasn’t much in the way of clouds in the sky so it wasn’t going to be an epic sunset, but we weren’t going to let that stop us. The first composition that caught our eye because of the shapes and textures the sand was making. The direction of the sunlight had changed since I last photographed the sand dunes a few months earlier so I wasn’t getting such harsh contrast lines on the ridge of the dunes. As the light was more behind the camera the scene was more evenly lit or illuminated, so I didn’t need any filters.

Smoke from some controlled burning a few hundred kilometres to the east drifted into the scene above the dunes. If I was honest, I’d have preferred the smoke not to be there (I would have preferred some cloud), but the patterns of the smoke as it floated past matched in some way to the patterns and shapes the dunes were making. There wasn’ much I could do about it, so I just went with it.

To help simplify the composition, I left lots of room for the sky above the dunes, make the dunes the focus. So on the 17-35mm lens, I was at ISO 100, f-stop 8, which gave me a shutter speed on 1/200 of a second. The second composition was again looking at the lines of the dunes and coming into the frame from the left, which textures in the foreground and mirroring some of the patterns of the smoke. With the decreasing light, my shutter speed was down to 1/30 of a second.

After the sun had set, gorgeous pinks and blue hues started emerging around the horizon behind the dunes. These colours provided a lovely soft background to the scene. The next composition we found had a group of sticks in the foreground so I changed lenses to the 24-70mm and zoomed over the sticks to isolate a single dune which provided a beautiful single ’s’ curve which I positioned on the one-third vertical line on the left, slowing the shutter to 1/8 of a second.

Thanks to Andrew Dawes, landscape and travel photographer from Adventuring Two, who found these sand dunes.

Check out Andrew Dawes –

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