Making a Photograph from White Sands National Park

This is a short blog I felt motivated to write about how I was able to create an image that I really liked when I first saw this scene at White Sands NP, but felt so disappointed when I got back home.

I was drawn to this scene by the shadows of the dunes in the foreground, leading the viewer into the mountain structures on the horizon, and the best cloud formations we had seen in all of the times spent in the White Sands.

However, there were some fundamental problems with the composition I had shot in the field. To help explain here is the original RAW file, straight out of my camera.

There were two elements to this image that I did not like; 1. the bald blue, hazy color between the bottom of the clouds and the horizon line, and 2. the clouds being cut off on the top left hand corner. After looking at this image a few times over the last 10 plus days since I returned home, I finally remembered a Photoshop technique that I was shown about 5 years ago, while on a workshop with Ian Plant in Patagonia.

It is a function available in Photoshop that allows one to compress areas of an image, just like the bald, blue, hazy, sky in this one. So here is what I got done in Photoshop.

A much more pleasing composition to my eye, with one more tweak in Photoshop required to fix the clouds. Using Canvas Size, and Content Aware Fill, here’s the next image, with a little space added above the cloud..

One final problem to address - how to get rid of the dirty looking haze about the horizon line? The solution that I liked most was to try converting the existing image into black and white. To do that I used my favorite B&W conversion software, NIK’s Silver Efex Pro 3, and here’s what I came up with.

‘Shadows and Light’, White Sands NP, September 17, 2022

So, the whole point of this exercise is to reiterate an Ansel Adams quote that has been a guiding light to me, ‘You don’t take a photograph, you make it’. I encourage you to work on your ‘make it skills’ with the amazing array of software development tools available to a digital photographer today, but first you have to develop the vision, of what can be done and/or what should be done, which comes from experience in developing thousands of images over several years. Have fun!