corwinprescott

Nicole Vaunt in White Sands for Into The Wild

Added 2015-05-17 22:01:50 +0000 UTC

We've been trying to make it to White Sands for as long as we have been traveling and shooting nudes in nature. If I were to add it up I'd say we are pretty close if not over 20 times having done this cross country thing, and we finally decided that despite it being very very out of the way this time we were going to make it there.The beautiful thing about shooting in the dunes was that it required very little effort to escape people. Hiking over one or two dunes gave us an incredible amount of privacy. Even with that White Sands National Monument is one of the hardest places I have ever photographed. All of the things I typically rely on to make photos were thrown off by this nearly impossible scenery. My in camera meter couldn't understand a scene with no mid tones, and my histogram so condensed I struggled to figure out how to meter. Looking at the back of the camera was pretty much impossible due to the brightness of the sun and sand. An incident light meter probably would have been handy, but I left mine sitting in a camera bag back in Philly.I eventually settled for having my histogram be as close to over exposed as possible without going over, and it did work very well, but the normal confidence I have when shooting was definitely affected by the elements. In order to keep sand out of my eyes I resorted to shooting with sun glasses, which isn't really ideal. Even focusing was difficult as the bright white sand through the auto-focus confusion into fits of confusion. Basically white sands was the perfect storm when it comes to photography nightmares.We did get a few moments where photos was easy. A storm blew in off the mountains to the south, and gave us an amazing opportunity to shoot in front of a rainbow after it passed, and the clouds gave us a break from the intense sun.All of these images were shot with my 17-40mm F4L as switching lenses in the sand in wind was completely out of the question. Even with all of the problems we faced I am still so happy we went and even happier with the photos. I hope you all enjoy these.https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w5g0au233kv109i/AABY7iHRtnKezi52LFyuii8ra?dl=0