Flat

USA 2011 - Death Valley

• Thomas Jefferson.

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While I have always had a fascination with telephoto lenses, I have always been reluctant to try them out for landscape photography. But while visiting White Sands National Park, I found an excellent excuse to use them as my primary landscape tool. Unfortunately, we only spent two days at this beautiful park, and I was hoping that one of those days, we would get to enjoy the brilliant skies that made the state of New Mexico famous among nature photographers. Well, it was not to be. On both days, we had overcast skies, and any color that appeared during sunset was very subdued.

Now, generally, on a location like that, I would naturally reach for my 24-70, but at White Sands, I realized that the wide-angle focal lengths would obscure the little patches of colors in the sky. The only way I could isolate the colors in the sky was by shooting my wide-angle in portrait orientation, and even then, the foreground patterns in the sand often dominated. So, in my frustration, I decided to try my 70-200, and it was the best decision of the trip. I could quickly isolate the small patches of color in the sky with the telephoto. Moreover, they allowed me to compress what looked like miles of white gypsum dunes doing their best imitation of ocean waves. I had a lot of fun shooting these telephoto landscapes all around the park, and today's image is one of the best from the lot.

Grand Prismatic Spring

Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park, California.

Okay, this will be the last shot of white sand that I post…at least for a little while anyway. This was from sunrise the next morning. Another...

White Sands National Monument, New Mexico

• George Burns.

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While driving to New Mexico en-route to White Sands National Monument, I checked the weather conditions at the park as I couldn’t believe my luck. On the days we were visiting, the park was supposed to have very little wind activity with decent enough cloud cover. I was more concerned about wind as, in my experience, it can make dunes an extremely unpleasant place to be in little time. Thankfully the wind forecast was correct, but the cloud cover was way thicker than I expected, and this posed a problem at a park where contrast is hard to come by.

I took this image during a sunset at the Alkali flats trail, a rather popular trail in the park. Unfortunately, I struggled to get a contrasty foreground even on a clear day during golden hour. After applying dodge and burn to the extend I am willing to go, there is precious little contrast in the foreground, even in a well-exposed image. It was my first time experiencing something like this, and after a good bit of frantic research at the motel room, I think I came across why the White Sands are tricky to shoot. Unlike most dunes, the white color of the gypsum sand reflects any available light, brightening the shadows considerably. I was able to counter this by employing my polarizing filter, which made a lot of difference in my images.