Category Archives: White Sands

After all the other photographers have left

By Robert | Published April 9, 2011

I was happy to see that one of the sug­ges­tions in Andrew Gibson’s new ebook (The Evoca­tive Image, see my review here) is some­thing I’ve been doing for years. Which is sim­ply stick­ing around after all the other pho­tog­ra­phers have gone home. Appar­ently, a lot of pho­tog­ra­phers think that once the sun has set, the good light is gone. While that may be true some­times, it’s def­i­nitely not true all the time. All kinds of things can (and often do) hap­pen after the sun has dipped below the hori­zon. The glow in the west­ern sky can turn won­der­ful col­ors, and that glow can light up the scene in front of or behind you, and/or reflect off water or rocks or… I could go on, but I’ll leave it to your imag­i­na­tion. Also, as it gets darker, our eyes can’t see color very well (or at all), but the cam­era still can — and some­times the col­ors the cam­era sees at twi­light are remarkable.

A case in point is White Sands. The pure white of the park’s gyp­sum sand is a near-perfect reflec­tor; if you spend enough time there and look care­fully, you’ll see dunes of almost every imag­in­able hue (see my White Sands pho­tographs gallery). But many of the most unusual (and some­times intense) col­ors occur well before dawn or long after sun­set. Which can be a prob­lem: The National Mon­u­ment is sur­rounded by a mis­sile range and is locked up tight at night. Gate open­ings and clos­ings vary dur­ing the year, so you need to sched­ule your visit care­fully to get as much time as you can between sun­set and gate clos­ing (not to men­tion avoid­ing the windy sea­son and the heat of sum­mer). Pre-dawn pho­tog­ra­phy is pretty much out of the ques­tion, unless you hire a ranger to open the gate early. This spe­cial ser­vice is arranged through the park office and will cost you. (Hint: it’s less painful if you share the cost with other pho­tog­ra­pher friends.) But it is totally worth it.

Tech­ni­cal Data:
Body: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 187mm
Expo­sure: ISO 100, f/11, 1/45 second

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Variations on a theme, White Sands National Monument

By Robert | Published January 17, 2011

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“Work­ing” a sub­ject is impor­tant if you want to get the best pos­si­ble image. When I man­age to remem­ber that my tri­pod isn’t rooted to the ground, and when the sub­ject inspires me, I try a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent angles and com­po­si­tions. Not to men­tion dif­fer­ent focus­ing (my eyes are not what they used to be), depths of field, focus stack­ing, expo­sure stack­ing (aka HDR), etc. As my friends will attest (some­times to their mount­ing frus­tra­tion), I’m def­i­nitely not the kind of pho­tog­ra­pher that takes one or two expo­sures and moves on.

All this “work­ing” usu­ally involves mov­ing around, search­ing for dif­fer­ent views, dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of ele­ments, dif­fer­ent fram­ings. But some­times, as in this set of images, it’s exactly the oppo­site: stay­ing fixed in one spot as the scene itself changes. In this case, I was at White Sands National Mon­u­ment. Small fluffy clouds were sail­ing by, but in the hour or so after sun­rise, they were too far up in the sky to cast shad­ows on the dunes. Even­tu­ally, how­ever, the sun rose high enough, and sud­denly I was sur­rounded by a land­scape that changed dra­mat­i­cally from one moment to the next.

I had been shoot­ing a sim­ple com­po­si­tion of a few pale dunes against a pale sky when, bam, the dunes started chang­ing from white to near black and back again in the blink of an eye. It took me a moment to real­ize what was going on, and then I shifted into high gear. The clouds were mov­ing so fast that all I could do was hit the shut­ter but­ton on my cable release again and again and hope for the best. Then there would be a long spell where sun and clouds failed to inter­sect, dur­ing which I could recom­pose slightly and check my focus. Then wham, another batch. A clas­sic case of hurry up and wait. Over and over again.

Back at the com­puter, it became appar­ent that it wasn’t an issue of which image was best, but which images worked best together as a group or sequence. Some­thing to keep in mind as you work a land­scape sub­ject. For more White Sands images, visit my White Sands land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy gallery.

Tech­ni­cal Data:
Body: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 280mm with 1.4 X Telex­ten­der
Expo­sure: ISO 100, f/22, 1/45 second

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