| Frans Lanting and Chris Eckstrom are leading an exclusive flying photo safari in Namibia in May 2012. Check www.lanting.com/phototours for details. |
Deep in the Namib Desert of southwest Africa, there’s a remarkable place. A river once flowed here, but these days it’s a dry clay pan with a scattering of dead camel thorn trees, surrounded by huge sand dunes. Many photographers have been lured to this spot by its stark beauty, and when I traveled to Namibia on assignment for National Geographic, I wanted to see it for myself.
I went early one day to scout the scene. It was serene and surreal at the same time, but once the sun came up, the light quickly became harsh. I left with only a few pictures—and an idea. The next morning I went back before dawn to a group of ghostly trees that had attracted my eye the first day. I framed them with a telephoto zoom to include a towering sand dune in the background that was dotted with golden grasses, and stopped the lens all the way down to compress the perspective. I applied a two-stop graduated neutral-density filter to reduce the contrast between the shady foreground and the sunlit background. Then I waited for the sun to edge down the dune. The magic moment came when the sun reached all the way down to the bottom of the dune just before it touched the edge of the clay pan.
When the image was first published in the Geographic, it went viral on the Internet overnight. People around the world wondered whether it was a photograph or a painting. Some thought it was altered in Photoshop, which it was not. What makes the image so arresting to viewers, and so confusing to non-photographers, is the extreme juxtaposition of bright sunlight right next to deep shade. With the sun igniting the warm, red sand and the white pan turning cool blue with the reflected color from the sky, the ghost trees rise through the boundaries of light, apparitions come to life.
I have two technical questions regarding your photo:
1. You mention that you used a telephoto zoom to frame your image, and “stopped the lens all the way down to compress the perspective.” I understand that zooming a telephoto lens all the way out to its longest focal length is what compresses the scene and that stopping down the aperture is what controls the depth of field. . . ?
2. You also mention that you used a “two-stop graduated neutral-density filter to reduce contrast between the shady foreground and sunlit background.” I am assuming, from your photo, that the ND filter was a hard-edge design because of the definite “cutoff” between the shaded foreground and the bright sand dune. My question regarding is, why don’t the trunks of the trees show the effect of using the filter, where they pass through the shaded area of the foreground and into the filtered area of the sand dunes?
Thanks for your image and report this month.