WC Bean Photography

So now I can hear you asking yourself "How is this possible? These colors are surreal...they can't be accurate." But have faith, dear reader, the colors are absolutely accurate and I'm about to explain how that can be.

See, there's an area in southern New Mexico called White Sands Missle Range which surrounds White Sands National Park. You may have seen the dunes in other deserts like Death Valley in California or Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. There are others too numerous to mention but White Sands is a creature in and of itself. It's the gypsum you see. That's right, Gypsum...the same white stuff that makes up the sheet rock on your walls. And it's white. Starkly white.

I was in New Mexico for a very noble reason. Some of you (or most of you, since I tend to brag on her a bit) know that my middle child, Heather, is a Special Needs kid. Notice I used a capital letter for Special. She really is Special with a capital S. Anyway, I digress...When Heather graduated from High School here in Colorado we wondered what would happen as far as higher education . A few years later we learned about Eastern New Mexico University from some of the girls Heather competes with and against in Special Olympics. It's a college with a cirriculum for Special Needs kids. We checked it out, had Heather tested for vocational aptitude, and now were delivering her to Roswell and ENMU for a year of college.

Due to time constraints I wasn't able to stay in Roswell as long as Judy before heading home so I started thinking of how I could maximize my trip. I was looking around the NM map and checking online for things to photograph when White Sands reached out and slapped me. So plans were made...Heather had to be in Roswell on Tuesday and I had to be home for work on Thursday. Judy wanted to stay an extra day or two so we checked air fares, looked at the load of junk we had to take for Heather to survive a year away from home, and decided 2 vehicles were in order. From there it was easy to plan on me leaving home Sunday morning to photograph Taos and White Sands then meet the girls in Roswell on Monday afternoon to be ready for Orientation on Tuesday. I packed the Murano and headed out.

My first stop was Taos, a place I'd wanted to photograph for many years. I knew I would be there at just the wrong time to shoot photos so I figured this would be a scouting trip for later photo trips. Sure enough I rolled into Taos around noon. The sun was high and bright casting harsh shadows straight down and flattening out the subjects I wanted to shoot. I shot some of the requisite tourist shots for documentation then headed south for the 5 hour drive to White Sands. The plan was to reach there before sunset which is one of the optimal times to photograph sand dunes. Well, the best laid plans....I ran into 2 highway construction projects in New Mexico and got to White Sands about 5 minutes before the sun went behind a bank of clouds that stretched to the western horizon. The light was done for the day but I took the drive into the dunes anyway, scouting for my morning shoot.

There is no camping allowed in the Dunes so on the way out I asked the ranger where I could park my car to sleep for the night and found out it was about 75 miles round trip to the nearest campsite. I bit the bullet and headed into Alamogordo 10 miles from the dunes to find a hotel room. That done, I turned in early to make it to the dunes and be at the gate when it opened at 7am. I figured that would get me to the location I had selected while the light was still low and warm from sunrise which is the very best way to shoot any sand dunes. I was there, got in, and by 7:15 I was hiking into the sand. Now I'm not saying that my fellow Americans are lazy, far from it. But there is a very strange phenomenon in the dunes. Near the road the sand is tracked by so many thousands of feet but as you walk into the dunes the tracks get fewer and fewer. 10 minutes from the road the only tracks in the sand were mine.

But I'm running long on the word count so I'll try and come to the point. You probably noticed right off that the shadows in all the sand images are very blue, not black as shadows are supposed to be. Here's why....see, the gypsum content makes this sand very white (Hence the name "White Sands"...clever, eh?) and as such, the white sands are Nature's own reflector. The blue you see in the shadows is a reflection of the sky. If there were clouds above the shadowed side of the dunes the shadows would be black or at the very least, dark grey. But this was a bright blue sky and the shadows were just as blue as they seem in the photos. Amazing. But like I said before, I did not in any way alter the color balance of these images. What you see is what was there. Incredible, isn't it?

Anyway, that's the saga of the blue shadows. I got on into Roswell Monday afternoon, found out that the hotel I'd booked online was doing maintenance on the pool, and realized it was 108 degrees. So I checked in, took a cold shower, and sat in the dark in my underwear as close to the air conditioner as I could get until the girls called to say they were coming into town around 6pm. To date, Heather is 2 weeks into her college career and doing well. She hasn't once called and begged me to come get her. Good luck H....you go girl!