One Desert Location, Three Different Days, Completely Different Images

Shooting the same desert location across multiple days and radically different conditions is one of the best ways to push your landscape work forward. This Arizona desert shoot is a masterclass in staying adaptable, and the images prove that preparation and flexibility matter far more than waiting for the perfect moment.

Coming to you from Michael Shainblum, this thorough field video follows Shainblum through multiple shoots in the Arizona desert, starting with an honest look at scouting. He uses Google Maps to drop pins on promising foreground elements like cholla cactus clusters, and uses his phone's 0.5x ultra wide setting to preview compositions before he ever sets up a tripod. On the first morning, with dramatic clouds rolling in, he shoots a classic sun star composition using f/16 to get that starburst effect, then brackets exposures and blends them in Lightroom. He even walks through a simple trick: blocking the sun with your hand to capture a cleaner foreground frame for blending. The Sony a7 IV isn't specifically called out, but his workflow is clearly built around mirrorless shooting with manual focus stacking.

When the second morning arrives clear and hazy, Shainblum makes a move that a lot of people wouldn't think to make: he pulls out the Sony 100-400mm telephoto and drops the sky entirely. Flat, hazy skies kill wide angle shots, but a telephoto lets you isolate texture, compression, and backlit cactus patterns in a way that feels completely different from the golden hour work. He manually focus stacks the telephoto frames and sends them to either Photoshop or Helicon Focus for processing. This section of the video alone is worth watching if you've ever packed up early because the sky wasn't cooperating.

Later, when clouds push back in for the evening, Shainblum switches to his 14mm f/1.8 lens and works through some of the most technically demanding shots of the trip. A five-image focus stack combined with an exposure blend for a sun peeking between rocks requires him to shoot at f/16 and manually select focus distances across multiple cacti from front to back. He's blending all of it in Helicon Focus, Lightroom, and Photoshop. One experimental frame has him getting as close to a single cactus as physically possible at 14mm, letting it fill the frame while a sun star burns through from behind. He wasn't sure it would work while he was shooting it, and that uncertainty is exactly what makes the result interesting.

What happens next with the storm, the brief rainbow, and what Shainblum calls one of the best desert sunsets he's ever seen is something you need to see for yourself. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Shainblum.