After stumbling across pictures of New Mexico’s Valley of Dreams online, I became obsessed with seeing it through my lenses. Located just north of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, its remote landscape of hoodoos, badlands, and jagged canyons promised the exact kind of mysterious, wild experience I always look for.
We camped out at the Chaco campgrounds ( always a pleasure), and the next day drove our old 1999 Nissan down the rugged trails to reach the trailhead. The actual place completely blew me away. It felt like walking on the moon. I spent hours capturing everything, but when I finally got back to my studio, the static raw images felt flat. They completely missed the dramatic and magical atmosphere I had felt while standing out there in the desert.
To bring that feeling to life, I broke away from reality. I converted the landscapes into high-contrast black and white and began weaving ethereal elements directly into the composition. By heavily editing the skies with swirling energy waves, deep starfields, and cosmic lens flares, the images transformed into something oniric and poetic. This collection is the result of that shift—an attempt to show you not just what the Valley of Dreams looks like, but the dreamlike magic of how it actually felt to be there.
