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.