Wanderings Through the Winter Desert Under a Full Moon

 Here the desert landscape is clearly lit by the rising full moon.

In this landscape you can see the no longer full moon just beginning to set.

The few withered and dried plants found in this desert grow not only up as normal plants do but also out along the ground.

Photographing snow is so interesting because of how dependent the color is on the surrounding lighting; something which it is hard to get a real feeling for until you are photographing huge swathes of it at night and with highly variable lighting. In the photos from a few days ago the shadows appear an intense blue, whereas these images are an orange-yellowish. I think black and white is sometimes a necessary choice when photographing snow because otherwise the strange colors can make the images feel too foreign. As a point of comparison (and an example of how foreign the lighting can make the snow look) the following image is one of the photos above before it was converted to black and white:

I think it is just wonderful that this landscape looks almost exactly like sand dunes not only in texture but also color.