Visiting Great Sand Dunes National Park

In preparation for our next Colorado trip, I am trying to complete the editing process for photos I took last fall. I am way behind, but getting close to finishing. We visited Great Sand Dunes National Park on the 2nd to last day of our late September 2012 trip. We were going to attempt to hike over to High Dune (650ft), but the altitude was getting the best of me so we decided to hike around the surrounding dunes. The dune field is huge and amazing! Once up at the top the views were really great. There are some deep valleys in the dune field. It’d be fun to run down into them, but not to climb back out. We had a great day for hiking, not too hot, not too windy. Although down on the flats below the dunes it was a bit windier. Sand pelted us in the face really making it feel like the desert. Medano Creek was not running when we were there. I am hoping that it will be running when we are out there this month. It’d be nice to get some shots with the creek and the dunes.

Below are some photos from the park. The sand dunes make for great black and white photos. The lines in the sand and wave patterns can make for some interesting compositions. I have several panoramics that I took at the park. I’ve recently started using the Photomerge feature in Photoshop to join the images together. I used to do hand stitching and editing, but Photomerge is saving me a TON of time, which is great when you have hundreds of photos to go through. The feature image at the top of this thread and the bottom 3 images used Photomerge to join multiple images into one high resolution image.

Next post: Hermit Pass road up to Hermit Lake outside of Westcliffe, Colorado