How I would love to spend a night in this place: as relentlessly as the sun burns down on us during the day, the starry sky at night is so wonderfully clear and bright in this Namibian place. As an ordinary tourist, you have no chance of being allowed to stay in this part of Sossusvlei before sunrise or after sunset. You arrive in groups after sunrise, in large jeeps through the gates of the national park. After arriving at the Deadvlei dunes at around 9 o’clock, only a few slopes are still in the shade for a short time. These moments are precious and last only a short time.

You have to be quick, follow your intuition, and try it out. The terrain is extremely attractive. The photographers in a group immediately spread out across the plain, as you can easily see in the picture. There are groups of trees, occasionally pairs or single trees, as here. You can’t stand it in the heat for longer than two hours. Afterwards, we had a late breakfast before returning to the hotel and leaving the national park.

The background consists of a band of blue sky without clouds, orange-red sand dunes and the yellowish-white soil of the dried-up riverbed. Rarely does a river die in this depression after a downpour. A long time ago, as evidenced by the dead trees, there was even more moisture here.

I took the picture with my Leica Q without a tripod. This camera has a fixed focal length of 28mm. At f/8 and ISO 200, the exposure time was 1/250s. What was important to me was the completeness of the shadow cast by my lonely tree in the foreground. You can find some of my images published on Landscape Photography Magazine.