[Leica] Namibia - Sossusvlei

[imagist3 at mac.com (George Lottermoser)]

enjoying traveling with you Marty.
especially
<http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Africa+2009/Namibia/ 
img641a.jpg.html>

one thing that your landscapes remind me of:
I never could warm up to skies and clouds rendered with medium to  
higher speed 35mm pan film.
When I looked at the prints and saw that I lost the textural contrast  
between the sand and smooth skies and soft clouds;
I always wished I'd pulled out the medium or large format gear (back  
in my film days).

Regards,
George Lottermoser
george at imagist.com
http://www.imagist.com
http://www.imagist.com/blog
http://www.linkedin.com/in/imagist

On Apr 19, 2010, at 7:29 AM, Marty Deveney wrote:

> Everyone who goes to Namibia goes to Sossusvlei.  It has some of the
> largest and most impressive sand dunes anywhere in the world.  I
> normally avoid places like this like the plague, but we went along
> anyway.
>
> The dunes were really magnificent:
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Africa+2009/Namibia/ 
> img368a.jpg.html
>
> Anything that dies just petrifies; it doesn't rot.  There is
> insufficient moisture 99% of the time for fungal growth or for the
> sorts of insects that break down flesh or wood in other environments:
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Africa+2009/Namibia/ 
> img646a.jpg.html
>
> The wind blows the sand into amazing shapes:
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Africa+2009/Namibia/ 
> img731a.jpg.html
>
> and the sky reciprocates with amazing cloudscapes:
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Africa+2009/Namibia/ 
> img952a.jpg.html
>
> But if you think we were really alone in a wilderness:
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Africa+2009/Namibia/ 
> img641a.jpg.html
> we were not.  To save the dunes, you're only allowed to clim (= wreck,
> really) one dune.  It was fairly uninteresting, being in a majestic
> place before dawn with several hundred other yabbering foreigners
> admiring the "majesty" of it all.  I could have stayed in Cape Town
> and felt that crowded.
>
> The sand here was very fine.  I took my M8 out once and afterwards the
> sensor looked like it was ice cream with sprinkles on it.  I hadn't
> changed the lens. The Arctic Butterfly does not do that great a job of
> removing fine particles of silica; they just don't charge up that
> well.  I carefully cleaned the sensor - somehow I managed to remove
> the vast majority of the very fine sand without scratching the sensor.
>  I cleaned the sensor frequently and with less overall concern after
> that.
>
> Comments etc welcome as always.
>
> More soon,
>
> Marty
>
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