White Sands National Park

When I visited the white Sands National park it was still the white Sands National Monument.

What's the difference? I had to look this up and found the answer from one of my favorite publications, Outside. National Parks have scenic, inspirational, educational, and recreational value. National monuments have objects of historical, cultural, and/or scientific interest.

So why the change? By redesignating from white Sands National Monument to White Sands National park, the people of New Mexico are able to protect the dunes from commercial exploitation.

The sands are crystals of gypsum and over the years there's been interest in commercially mining them.

I took this image a short way out on the Alkali Flat trail. The full trail is a 5 mile / 8 km trek and anyone familiar with walking on dry sand will know that's not a trivial undertaking.

The white crystals are near perfect reflectors so the sun beats up at you from the ground below just as much as it does from the sun above. Wear a hat, sunscreen, sunglasses and take plenty of water with you.

Any breeze at all will start lifting microscopic dust so either pick your lens before you head out or have some form of lens changing bag with you. watch out also for dust entering the barrels of your zoom lenses!

Image Processing

This is pretty near the in-camera shot with just the horizon leveled in Adobe Photoshop. For some reason, I find the control in Photoshop to be better than that in Lightroom.

Taken in 1995 or 1996, the original image is on slide film.

For this image I:

• Scanned the original slide with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED
• Straightened and cropped the image in Adobe Photoshop
• Applied some adjustments in Skylum Luminar 4 (get 50% off if you buy before June 17, 2020. Get a further $10 in savings by using my coupon code)
• Applied some tonal contrast to the sky using Nik Color Efex

Camera

I would have used my Canon EOS5 (A2E in the United States) camera for this shot. A feature of this camera that I loved and miss was the eye-controlled focus point selection.

Perhaps is that there were only 5 focus points but I found it super accurate and a lot easier to use than the joystick on my current Canon 5D Mark III.

I didn't have any “L-Series” lenses back then so, judging from the curvature of the horizon, and the way the sand lines converge to a point, I would have taken this with my Sigma 21-35 wide-angle zoom. The modern equivalent is the Sigma 24-35mm f/2.

Follow this link for the National park Service's White Sands National Park web site.