Exploring the wealth of photography in White Sands National Park
The best place to make photographs in New Mexico is unquestionably White Sands National Park. It is the Grand Canyon of New Mexico in that you could go to the park every day for a month, and still makes hours of photos without running out of subject matter. The topography of the park actually changes day to day with the wind! This is at least my fifth visit to the park. I brought just one lens, the Sony 24mm f/1.4 GM. I focused on finding angles. I wanted to include the flora of the park in each shot too. This was also the real world debut of using my new mirrorless camera. The results of the photo above are unlike any photo I made at White Sands before. That is the amazing thing about the park, visit after visit, there is no end to the photos one can make.
Telephoto Dreamscape Views of Sand Dunes in Colorado
This is my second series of photos from Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado (wide angle first series here), this time featuring all images made with a telephoto lens (Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 G Master). You may think for landscape photography that automatically it’s best to use a wide angle lens. Many times that is the case, but when you are very far from the subject, even a very large subject like sand dunes, a telephoto lens can bring you in close, and produce a unique looking landscape image. As I was driving in to Sand Dunes National Park, I thought the sand dunes themselves looked fake, like CGI. There were this soft focus, creamy aberration before more solid, corporeal mountains. As I was leaving the park, I pulled over and took out the telephoto lens to capture these dreamscape like images. Tell me the sand dunes do not look like they were put into the photos as digitally created features?
My first visit to Carlsbad Caverns was all the way back in 2000 during my first attempt to move to California. I have two standout memories from that visit. The first was that it was on a weekday in March with no school groups and the caverns were virtually empty and it was doubly amazing to have them essentially all to myself. The second memory was dropping my (film) camera into the toilet in the visitor center! Fast forward to 2021 and the caverns were filled with few people using the recommended whisper voice, and my camera was digital and mirrorless, and I did not even dare take it into the restroom!
Photography sometimes take risks with amazing results
This is another instance of how my prolific rural land real estate work takes me to new and amazing places, like Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. The client actually wanted pictures of the sand dunes, so I was being paid to be there to make these photographs. I thought I was wasting my time making the long drive from Alamosa (45 minutes away) to the sand dunes because cloud cover was very heavy and the sun was nowhere to be seen. However, in my experience, the skies do open up just in time, and that was very much the case this time. The risk was worth it and paid off spectacularly as I was able to make dramatic sunset images of the sand dunes, and I even stopped later once the sun was gone from the main park itself, for telephoto shots of the dunes from afar, which I will share in another blog post. My advice is, it is always worth it to take the risk to potentially get the photos you want. At most you will waste time, but imagine if I had stayed at the hotel and saw this sunset from the hotel window instead of on the dunes themselves?
After two years I had the opportunity to return, briefly, to White Sands National Monument. It was not at an ideal time of day for photography, but I had a new powerful tool with me this time, the incredible Sony 12-24mm f/2.8 G Master lens. For this photo series I really wanted to focus on the minimalism of White Sands when photographed up close. The patterns in the sand dunes fascinate me. They are mesmerizing. Then there is the stark contrast between the white sand and almost electric blue, cloudless sky above.
For me, the phrase joshua tree has always been associated with the famous U2 album from 1987 and its iconic cover art. There is actually no joshua tree in the photo. I finally got a chance to visit Joshua Tree National Park and soon realized that the eponymous trees are not the stars of the park by a long shot. The real attraction are the rock formations. Some tower, some are piles, they are all sitting there challenging you to climb them. This photo story presents a set of black and white photos of a lone climber on a rock face and a series of color photos one of which is made up of silhouettes of me, Jessica, Kiki and Artie!
