The night walks slowly at first when it comes to the Sossusvlei dunes in western Namibia. It allows all animals, the leopards and the baboons, the springboks and caracals, the geckos and the bat-eared foxes, the gemboks and the hyenas -- the ones who need to seek their shelters and the ones who will hunt -- to move around.

I pick up that slow pace and move along the base of a huge dune. It is already glowing: its dark burnt orange comes from the iron within, oxidized. The sands of the dunes in Namib-Nakluft National Park are shaped by the winds blowing from the Atlantic ocean and are still warm and squeaky under my boots. I think there is still time to find the angle I want and capture what looks from my flat clay pan like a sky-high Pablo Picasso guitar.

And suddenly there is no more time. The night is speeding up, throwing ink dark shadows exactly where shadows love to live: into deep ravines, sandy crevasses, bottomless pits. The sunlight hits as hard as it can and paints the dunes with its broadest brush of hot hues just for a couple of my breaths. And then it vanishes. 

Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott, a wife and husband team, are internationally published photographers of nature. They practice long commitments to places they love and spend most of the year following animals, ever-changing landscapes, and moving with the light and the seasons while exploring the rhythm and wild essence of remote places.

Cowboy Hat, Route 66, Seligman, Arizona.

For more than 30 years, Vincent J. Musi has photographed diverse subjects—from traveling Route 66 to global warming, life under volcanoes, Sicilian mummies, the American landscape, culture, history and archaeology.

Follow Vince's instagram @vincentjmusi.

Arizona, 2023 | A long-exposure image of Monument Valley in moonlight, with the light of dawn breaking on the right. The hour-long image, made from a timelapse sequence, reveals the Earth rotation with the rising stars trailing above the picturesque massive rock formations. Known as buttes, they are composed of hard rock left behind after water has eroded away the surrounding soft rock. Monument Valley at the break of dawn. A meteor appears above the picturesque massive rock formations. Known as buttes, they are composed of hard rock left behind after water has eroded away the surrounding soft rock.

Monument Valley has been the backdrop for many American western movies, but more important it is an iconic ancestral land of Navajo Nation, sacred to the local tribes. The area is now a tribal park, open to visitors, and managed by Navajo Nation.

Babak Tafreshi is a photojournalist, explorer, and speaker that uses the context of night sky photography to bridge Earth and sky, art and science, and cultures and time. A National Geographic photographer and cinematographer, he lives in Boston with his wife and child.

Follow Babak on Instagram @babaktafreshi.