Black and White Images from the White Sands

On the last few days of January, I drove down to the White Sands National Monument to meet up with photography buddies Dan Orcutt, Dave Peterman, Bill Wallace, Dick Negaard, and Steve Wapon. I already posted some images from this trip on Facebook, flickr, Google+ as well as on this blog, but I have not shown everything as this place is crazy and magical and there are too many keepers. So bare with me as I slowly make my way through. I shot a total of 521 raw images and undoubtedly would have shot more if my original plan to spend the night on the sand hadn't been scuttled by the schedule of the nearby missile range. They shoot actual rockets over the sand dunes and the monument is sometimes closed due to this for overnight camping. If one goes astray, you don't want to be there. Also, even if there is no missile test, it opens way too late for sunrise shooting, so you really want to camp in the back country camping for sunrise shooting. We'll do that next time. Luckily, another morning, Dave had arranged for the rangers to let us in before sunrise (which they do at a price ;-) ). However, the missile range at the last moment decided to do some tests that morning, making it impossible to get in to the main dune areas. The Monument, feeling bad about it, was nice enough to let us enter a corner of the park where missile danger was low so that we could experience the sunrise anyway. Here is an example image from that morning. More on that later I am sure.

This post will focus on the black and white images I created in this place. There are quite a few. Especially during the day (i.e. not near sunrise or sunset), there are lots of compositions that lend themselves very well to black and white. These images will be mostly in chronological order. Clicking on the image will bring them up much larger and you can get prints from the links too.

Survival

Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28 mm f/2.8 at 17mm, f/22, 1/20s, ISO100, handheld
I really liked the wispy texture in the sand here and the glow near the plant.

Ridgeline

Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28 mm f/2.8 at 16mm, f/22, 1/60s, ISO100, handheld
The dunes are rife with compositions such as this. In the top left, you can see the little stick that is the subject of the next image.

Point break

Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28 mm f/2.8 at 16mm, f/22, 1/80s, ISO100, handheld

Radiowaves

Nikon D600, Nikon 70-200mm f/4 at 70mm, f/8.0, 1/500s, ISO 100, handheld
I loved the juxtaposition of the shapes in the twig with the waves in the sand.

The reveal

Nikon D600, Nikon 70-200mm f/4 at 200mm, f/11, 1/200s, ISO 100, handheld
telephoto lenses are nice to compress the perspective. Those mountains are quite far away in reality.

Lonesome

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 24mm, f/16, 1/160s, ISO 100, handheld
Life must be hard for plants on the gypsum dunes.

Ridges

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 80mm, f/11, 1/160s, ISO 100, handheld
In the inter dune areas, one finds these intriguing ridges that look to be formed by water flow and evaporation. I've seen few pictures of this but they offer many opportunities for interesting compositions. More views of these ridges below.

How many grains?

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 24mm, f/22, 1/30s, ISO 100, handheld
Classical ripple composition. I use this one as background on my twitter feed.

Turning a corner

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 24mm, f/16, 1/50s, ISO 100, handheld
It is getting close to golden hour here and the sand is taking up a gorgeous iridescence. This will be especially clear if you are viewing this on a retina (HiDPI) screen. My blog is smart enough to serve you high resolution images on those.

Phoenix

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 24mm, f/16, 1/60s, ISO 100, handheld
A little later some wispy clouds moved in that reminded me of a bird. This is the same ridge as the image immediately above.

Snake and Bird

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 44mm, f/16, 1/60s, ISO 100, handheld
This is the same cloud and I composed it with an interesting sand structure that looked like a snake to form a mythological image. Appropriate for the southwest I think.

Dreams of faraway shores

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 24mm, f/22, 1/30s, ISO 100, handheld
These are the ridges one finds in the inter dune areas. They are just fascinating and give many opportunities for leading lines.

Sleeping bird

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 24mm, f/22, 1/30s, ISO 100, handheld
This of course is a horizontal version of the previous image. The dune reminded me of a (cartoonish) bird.

This really was just a subsection of all the black and whites I created, but these are my favorites. I hope you enjoyed them. Also see the entire White Sands gallery at smugmug, on Facebook, on Google+, and black and whites at flickr,

A river runs through it

Sunset at White Sands National Monument.
Not realizing that the White Sands website was incorrect on closing time, the ranger was lightly annoyed that we were too late exiting the park. It is a pity that the park closes so early. One can camp out on the sand, but the days that I was there, every morning had a missile test. which meant that one could not get camping permits. If you are going here for sunrise or sunset pictures, be aware of the restrictions.

Nikon D600, Nikon 70-200mm f/4 at 70 mm, f/16, 1/5 s, ISO 100.
On smugmug. On flickr. On Facebook. On Google+.

To There and Back

Sunset graces Sierra Blanca Peak and grazes the sand dunes in White Sands NM.

Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85 mm f/3.5-4.5 at 62mm, f/11, 1/40s, ISO 100.
On Smugmug, On flickr, on facebook, Google+.

White Sands Yucca

One of the nice things about raw capture is that you can always go back later and redo your images using more modern processing tools. We have a very large print of an image I took on a family vacation to the South at White Sands National Monument hanging on our wall. It is a gorgeous image of a yucca in the white dunes in my not so humble opinion but color wise I always thought it was duller than we experienced the moment which was quite magical with gorgeous warm sunset light playing over the dunes and ripples in the sand. This turned the shadow areas on the white sand a gorgeous blue. Neither comes out very good in the print. So I dug up the harddrive that these older images are stored on and fired up Lightroom which has the references in its database to these older images. Typed in White Sands in the search box and poof there the images were. They were of course done in the old process in Lightroom and I was using the Adobe Standard profile. Users of Lightroom may know that this usually leads to dull color. Switching to the new process extracted significantly more detail, turning on automatic CA correction also helped, but mostly the image was helped by selecting the landscape profile for the camera. I also upped the exposure compensation a little, making the image more high key as appropriate. Exported the three photographs to 16-bit ppRGB tiff and stitched them in hugin. Below is the result as uploaded to flickr



The same yucca image (cropped differently) in the older treatment is here. The same cropping in the older treatment is on smugmug here, which is the print we have on our wall. I'll probably replace the smugmug image sometime soon with the new higher quality image. Even though it was a few years ago, this image feels much more like the experience we had trolling on the dunes that evening.

White Sands

I got a few minutes at sunset at White Sands on a little family vacation to take some pictures. Here are a few:

Some more can be found in the smugmug gallery. I also have a small subset on flickr where you can leave some comments.

This place is superfun to visit with the family BTW.