After visiting Coral Pink Sand Dunes in Utah, White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, and Imperial Sand Dunes in California, I knew I was in for a tough trek on earth that moves underfoot with each step.

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Footprints were everywhere as we started out. I softened the image above in post-processing to minimize the trampled look of all the footprints and give it a dreamy effect.

Ray and I were both glad we went after we considered giving it a miss earlier in the day because it had been extremely hazy for a few days and there were no good sunsets since we got there. But I knew it was my last chance, my last real photo shoot of the season before we started to head home.

We were treated to a glorious sunset. I would have been so mad at myself if I didn’t go! The only thing I could have asked for was a dune with little or no footprints, but that was not going to happen in this very popular national park unless I hiked a lot further and was willing to hike all the way back in the dark.

The image above is a high dynamic range image made by combining three exposures in post-processing.

Next time I’ll try to wait until a wind storm passes through erasing all the footprints and wiping the slate clean.

This is Ray walking along the crest of a dune with the mountains in the background.

Anne McKinnell Photography

Just like Devils Golf Course, where only the Devil could play golf, here at Devil’s Cornfield, only the Devil could eat this corn! It’s not corn at all — it’s arrowweed.

I made this image in the early evening just as the light began to soften, but while there was still plenty of light illuminating the mountains and making the stacks of arrowweed appear golden. I was heading to the sand dunes for sunset, so I didn’t spend much time here. I just pulled off to the side of the road for a few quick shots.

From ground level, all the arrowweed shrubs blended together, but I discovered that by standing on top of the box in the bed of the truck I could get an elevated perspective and create some separation between the shrubs.

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Anne McKinnell Photography

The haze tended to lift around sunset and I got a few good shots at Devils Golf Course and Badwater Basin, but the days were pretty much a write off except for scouting locations.

On the fourth day I was in luck! The haze finally lifted and there was just enough cloud in the sky to make a photographer happy.

Sometimes waiting for the right light can take days!

I used this opportunity to photograph some of the vivid colours along Artist Drive, a scenic one way loop road with many sharp curves and deep dips.

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The entrance to Artist Drive has countless multicoloured rocks that make a striking foreground.

Then you start going up in elevation to a picturesque lookout.

From here you can also look back on Badwater Basin. In the photo below, you can see some of the haze still in the distance.

Then came my favourite section of Artist Drive known as Artist’s Palette where the rocks display many of the same colours I saw at the Valley of Fire but the terrain was more rugged.

I made all of these images handheld. The heat makes me lazy and I was going out with one lens and no tripod, but when there is lots of light and you have a versatile lens like the 24-105L those are corners you can easily cut.

Anne McKinnell Photography

I was already feeling sluggish and had a headache coming on and it was super hot — 90 degrees in March! I remember that I went out for the very short walk at Badwater Basin with only one lens and I didn’t even bring my tripod. My camera felt like it weighed a ton!

I’m surprised these images turned out as good as they did actually!

Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park got its name from a surveyor who was mapping the area and could not get his mule to drink from the small pool of water. He said it must be bad water and the name stuck.

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I have seen images from this location where the salt flats were exceptionally white. I did a little research on this and discovered that it changes every year and some years it looks muddier than others. I guess this was a muddy year because the tops of the salt formations were not white at all.

Death Valley was not created by erosion but by earthquakes. Movements in the earth’s crust dropped the valley’s lowest point, Badwater Basin, to 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere.

Unlike Devils Golf Course, not too far away, Badwater Basin floods occasionally but never enough for the water to overflow and seek out the sea (that would be an awful lot of water). The water just flattens out the basin and evaporates leaving the salts behind.

Because of the popularity of this section of the park, there is a strip of salt that has been pounded down by years of people treading on the surface to create what resembles ice.

There was only a very small pool of water and no, I didn’t drink it!

I think having one of those light mirrorless camera might be just the ticket on days like this or when I want to go on a longer hike without having to carry all my equipment.

So I’m curious, have you ever tried one? What do you think about the quality compared to a DSLR?

Anne McKinnell Photography

I can’t imagine what it would be like to visit this place in summer when the temperatures reach 120 degrees! No wonder it’s called Death Valley.

At first it seemed like there was nothing here but dirt, salt, sand and lots of heat. But as I started exploring the different sections of the park I realized how diverse it really is. I can’t think of another place that has dry lake beds, sand dunes, and colourful rock formations all in close proximity.

There is a flat salt bed that covers a large section of the park, created when the lake that was once here evaporated and left behind mineral deposits that eventually became a coating of lumpy salt. Occasional rainfall smoothes out the salt into a flat bed.

But the section known as Devils Golf Course rarely receives any rainfall and so the salt crystals continue to grow and form pinnacles that are now about 3 feet deep.

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You can even hear it happening. While I was making these images I could hear the popping and cracking of salt crystals bursting apart as they expand and contract.

It was named Devils Golf Course after a 1930′s guidebook that said only the Devil could play golf on its surface. Since it’s named “Devils” and not “Devil’s” I guess they are expecting more than one player!

I made these images by using a wide-angle lens and positioning my camera close to the ground to highlight the impossibly difficult terrain. It can be incredibly bright here during the afternoon, so I waited until the sun was setting behind the nearby mountains so there was softer light.

Anne McKinnell Photography

It was in the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. Ray and I planned on doing a two hour evening hike (after a day of hiking) and our friends decided to stay a little closer to the parking lot and explore nearby. We all agreed to meet back at the car after sunset.

The shots I made that evening were disappointing due to a number of factors, not the least of which was some unfriendly photographers who rudely left their bags and tripods all over the place so as not to share the spot. (But that’s okay, I had no problem returning another time when the light was better anyway, so there.)

What I did get out of that evening was two locations to return to: one was the place I just visited and the other was the melting strawberry sundae.

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Never have I been to a place with colours like these. I spent hours here photographing the textures, lines, colours and patterns in the rock. Here are a few of my favourites.

I can’t wait to return here on our next trip down south to do some more exploring in the Valley of Fire and the rest of Nevada.

On another note, my eCourse “The Compelling Photograph” starts in two days and I’m so excited about it! Unfortunately there’s no more room! I was very surprised that it sold out in nine days. But, if you want to be the first to be informed when registration opens for the next course, you can hop on the waiting list here. Just look for the box with the red dashes around it and enter your email address there.

Anne McKinnell Photography

When I listened to some previous recordings of the show I was struck by how everyone’s story was different yet the goal was the same: to create change in order to live a better life.

My goal involved a quest to become a happier person and finding that happiness by changing my career and lifestyle. A quick recap for my new readers: I closed my software consulting business, sold my house where I lived for 15 years, sold almost all of my stuff, bought an RV and set out to live the life I always dreamed of – travel photographer.

No one paid me to be a travel photographer. I just bought an RV and spent some of my savings so that I could go and experience the life I wanted by driving all around North America for a year photographing beautiful places. Luckily for me my husband, Ray, also wanted to travel North America, but we both thought it was something we would do when we retired. You can read the whole story about how I changed my life here if you’re interested.

If I learned one thing through our journey it is this: don’t live for someday.

I can’t tell you how very much it means to me to think that my story can inspire others. Not only was I contacted by the radio show, but I receive emails every week from readers who use the word inspiring. One reader even wrote to tell me that my journey inspired him and his disabled wife to change their lifestyle so they could lead more fulfilling lives. She is housebound, but now their house goes with them. He said that now they had a reason to live. Seriously, he actually said “reason to live.”

I almost cried when I read those words.

It’s astonishing to me that it wasn’t all that long ago that I was searching for my own reason to live. I truly had no idea that it was in me to inspire someone else’s reason to live.

After the first few months of our initial year-long journey, Ray and I knew that we loved being nomads and didn’t want to go back to our old lives. We decided to become snowbirds. We were only home in BC for four months before our first snowbird season would begin. (Actually, because we are from Vancouver Island, we like to call ourselves rain birds!)

The first year we traveled our focus was on experiencing the life, making beautiful images, and sharing them with the world. For our first snowbird season, the goal had to change because now we needed to make our lifestyle sustainable. We needed to start some “location independent” businesses if we wanted to continue being nomads.

Things were a bit different this time as we both spent many hours writing and less time traveling. We stayed in places for longer periods of time and didn’t go nearly as far. Here’s how our travel map looks for our first snowbird season.

We focused on the part of North America that we missed on our first trip, southern California, Arizona and Nevada. Please click the images to view larger versions.

Joshua Tree National Park, California

Saguaro National Park, Arizona

The Valley of Fire, Nevada

And, oh yeah, we went to Mexico and got all our teeth fixed!! I know, it sounds like a risky thing to do but we met so many people in the RV parks along the way who had done just that and told us that their dental work was excellent, it was clean, and cheap. I had 8 crowns for $1280! The dentist was the best dentist I have ever been to. All the work was done in about 6 days. It could have been quicker, but Ray had some complications with his dental work and had to have oral surgery, which went smoothly and quickly.

All in all we couldn’t be happier with our new lives. My eBooks have been very successful and now I’m just about to start my first eCourse. Ray started a new website called “Love Your RV” all about RVing (it’s at http://loveyourrv.com if you’re interested in checking it out) and he’ll have some eBooks soon too. We are just getting to the point where our businesses are paying the bills.

But the most important part is that we discovered the freedom of the snowbird. We spend our time doing things that we love and anytime we are ready we have the freedom to fly.

Anne McKinnell Photography

My friend, Don Davis, whose RV park we were staying at, said he had heard of it but had never been there himself. It was a great adventure just waiting for us!

It took an hour to drive to the beginning of the un-maintained road and then the map showed another 15 miles to get to Little Finland. We figured we would arrive an hour before sunset.

It’s a good thing we were in Don’s four wheel drive truck or we never would have made it to the end of that bumpy road at all! It took us well over an hour to travel those 15 miles and by the time we got there we had missed sunset all together, but at least we found a cool spot to bookmark for a future trip.

Ray, agile as his is, quickly scrambled up the steep rocks. I tried, but with my back already sore from the bumpy drive, I couldn’t make it even with Ray’s help, so I told him to go ahead and I would try to find another way.

There was a muddy river so I decided to walk along the path beside the river to see if it led anywhere. The rocks got less and less steep and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw this off in the distance:

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It immediately reminded me of the Inuksuk, a navigational marker used by the Inuit which we often see back home in BC. They mark a place of interest like a good fishing spot or a trailhead. While this isn’t an Inuksuk, when I saw it I immediately thought “this is the way.” And sure enough from the spot on the river to the balancing rocks was the easiest way to get up to the higher rocks, and once I got to it I could see the beautiful rock formations beyond it.

By this time there was very little light left in the sky and I only had time to photograph my navigational marker and take a few more shots before I had to head back.

Thank you, whoever made these balancing rocks! I would have gone home without any images had I not seen it.

Anne McKinnell Photography

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Anne McKinnell Photography

My husband thinks I’m in love with Canon but really it’s a toss up between Canon and Gitzo. Or maybe it’s Really Right Stuff that has my heart.

At first I wasn’t sure about spending so much money on it. I think it was around $1,000 by the time I bought the legs, the ball head, the clamp and the L bracket. But it is sooooo worth it.

The thing weighs practically nothing!

Even though I knew how much it meant to me, I don’t think I quite understood how deep the feeling was … until I broke the Really Right Stuff ballhead

It was so sad the way the lever just kept turning and turning without tightening up to hold my camera steady.

And wouldn’t you know it, that evening was the best of all the sunsets I saw in Nevada’s stunning Valley of Fire.

All I could do was dry my tears and crank up my ISO to make the best of it.

I made each of these shots hand-held. Please click any of the images to view larger versions.

Walking in The Valley of Fire. ISO 800.

Sunset in The Vally of Fire. ISO 1250.

Watching the sunset in The Valley of Fire. ISO 2000.

I really have to hand it to Really Right Stuff. The part was 3 years old and it was still covered by their warranty. Not only did they fix it free of charge, but they shipped me a loaner part that was in my hands 48 hours later. Thank you Really Right Stuff!!

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Anne McKinnell Photography