Drive 2007 - Day 10 - Drives - Beneath the Waves

Drive 2007 - Day 10

article and photographs by Ben Lincoln

In central New Mexico, I visited White Sands National Monument. The colour (or lack thereof, depending on your perspective) of the sand is due to it being gypsum instead of the silica that's typical elsewhere.

The gypsum sand makes for a surreal appearance. It looks exactly like snow, in person or in photographs.

White Sands stood in for the Middle East when Michael Bay shot the two live-action Transformers films, although that work was done on the adjacent US military-controlled property, rather than the National Monument itself.

White Sands National Monument 1

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From near the entrance of White Sands National Monument. The bright layered pattern of the background mountains in the near infrared is something I haven't seen anywhere else.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-19
Version: 2.0

White Sands National Monument Handheld Shots

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Various handheld shots from White Sands.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Various
Filters: LDP CC1
Date Processed: 2007-09-27
Version: 1.0

White Sands National Monument 2

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Some of the bushes typical of White Sands.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm (?)
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-25
Version: 2.0

White Sands National Monument 3

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One of the more fertile (non-dune) areas of White Sands. Here are some more good examples of large-scale ultraviolet patterns on plants, with sharp contrasts between the stalks and heads.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm (?)
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-25
Version: 2.0

White Sands National Monument 4

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I include this one mostly as another example of clouds outside the visible spectrum, but near the bottom you can see that White Sands is quite colourful when you factor in the near infrared, at times looking like some sort of enormous fancy ice-cream-based dessert.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-25
Version: 2.0

White Sands National Monument 5

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Although the plants at White Sands have dramatic variation in an expanded spectrum, the same can't generally be said of the sand itself. Even white-balancing these images was hard due to the broadband reflectivity of the dunes.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-25
Version: 2.0

Animal Prints at White Sands National Monument

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I didn't see any animals directly at White Sands, but another visitor was nice enough to point out this set of undisturbed footprints in the sand.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: LDP CC1
Date Processed: 2007-09-27
Version: 1.0

White Sands National Monument 6

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Although most of the area is more or less pristine, every so often I would come across an unusual feature like this long furrow, which appears as though it should lead to the smoking wreckage of a spacecraft. The UVA version of this shot is omitted because it's focused on the furrow, leaving the (relatively) massive bush out of focus and taking up the entire forground.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-26
Version: 2.0

White Sands National Monument 7

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One more multispectral cloud comparison from this area.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-26
Version: 2.0

White Sands National Monument 8

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Wandering a ways into the less-traveled parts of the area, I was able to find some footprint-less dunes and a valley between them.

Date Shot: 2007-09-09
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-04-26
Version: 2.0

New Mexico is a big enough place that I wasn't going to be able to visit both White Sands and my next destination (Carlsbad Caverns National Park) in a single day - at least, not if I were going to have enough time to explore the cave properly. I stopped for the night in the town of Carlsbad, which has quite a few large motels but almost all of them were empty, so it was easy to get a good deal.

At the motel, I made an unfortunate discovery - while I was at Vasquez Rocks on the sixth day of this trip, some debris had gotten onto the sensor of my camera. I'd brought a sensor cleaning kit along, and was able to get it taken care of, but I was still going to have to manually edit it out of hundreds of exposures, one by one.

This was one of the big disadvantages of earlier DSLRs. With a film SLR, every shot gets a new "sensor" because the film isn't reused, so if something gets inside the body while changing lenses it's a hassle, but not on the same scale. Point-and-shoot digital cameras never had this problem, because their bodies are sealed. More recent DSLRs have self-cleaning sensors that use ultrasonic vibration to remove dust and other material at the push of a button (or, for Canon models, when the camera is turned on). Photographers can also avoid this situation by not changing lenses in the field, but since I shoot almost entirely with prime (non-zoom) lenses, that would have made for a very boring series of pictures.

Date: 9 September 2007
Starting Mileage: 65633
Ending Mileage: 66016
Distance Travelled (Day): 383 miles
Distance Travelled (Trip): 3662 miles
Gallons of Fuel Purchased (Day): 8.8
Gallons of Fuel Purchased (Trip): 114.9

GPS Map of Day 10

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