Arrakis

The walk out was the work. Mesquite Flat is tracked to pieces near the parking area, so getting a clean face of sand means going until the footprints stop, and then going further. Our friends had gone to a different spot for sunset and my wife stayed at the truck with the dogs, so it was just me out there.

Because I was so far out, shooting long was the solution to make this scene work. At 112mm the dunes stack — the ridgelines fold into each other and you get the scale the place actually has. Wide, they shrink to nothing; the peaks look like sand piles and the whole thing reads flat.

The colour arrived after the sun vanished. It dropped behind the mountains and the sky kept going, filling in pink and orange over the next several minutes, and the eight frames of this panorama were shot into that.

I’d read Dune, but hadn’t seen the Villeneuve movie yet — it came out later the same year — so the Arrakis in my head was still entirely my own. Standing out there, it was the closest thing I’d found to it.

Then I walked back in the dark with the lights from the parking area and my own footprints as my only guides.