As I stated in my previous post, the first stop on my March 7th day trip was at the Valley of Fires, but from there I headed southward to White Sands National Monument.
I thought it was really worth the trip, and I enjoyed the photo ops…some of which were very challenging to capture on film. As the name implies the sand is…well white! It’s made up of gypsum I believe, and the sand has a highly reflective characteristic to it which can fool your camera meter into underexposing the sand. When the sand is underexposed it appears as a gray to almost brown color, as you will see from the picture below.
This shot looks otherworldly, but I still like the result even if it doesn’t represent the true “whiteness” of the sand dunes. You can see the rest of the shots I took here, some of which accurately show the “whiteness” of the sand. Again, I had this slide film scanned in by a photo lab and I didn’t remove any of the dust or artifacts gained by the scans.
