In western Rajasthan, near Jaiselmer, there are nicely shaped sand dunes in the Thar Desert. It's a great place to photograph Indian models in colorful saris, and it's also ideal for photographing camels in silhouette. I will post the latter in a separate blog, but here you can see a carefully orchestrated shot in which the young women traversed an untouched dune with perfect ripples in the sand. To repeat this shot, I had to find another dune without any footprints or tire marks. The only dunes that worked were angled in such a way as to catch the extreme sidelighting from the low sun. It's the pronounced ripples that make this work. I used a wide angle lens for depth of field and to include the shadows as well as a large area of sand. My settings were 1/200, f/11, and 200 ISO. The focal length was 24mm. It took three languages to instruct the models what I wanted of them. I gave the instructions in English, my guide translated into Hindi, and then a second, local, guide translated that into Rajasthani for the women to understand.
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