This next roll is a very different one to most of my others. I once again made my way outdoors to take some landscape and nature sorts of pictures for the first time in a while. This roll covers White Sands National Park and Santa Fe’s botanical garden.

Immediately, the weirdest thing about this roll is how inconsistent the color is, mostly in regards to the pictures at White Sands. These pictures range from completely cyan to purple to yellow and it’s wild. Obviously, looking at the negatives there are differences but it’s really hard to tell colors properly. I can only assume that my scanner is doing really weird color correction but it’s not entirely clear to me in what direction or why. If I were more caring about this, I’d figure out the exact color settings and negative setup but honestly I don’t really care. The differences in color are quite interesting to me even if they’re some software relic. If I were being truthful, the color would likely be closest to the second picture from the top and left. The sand at White Sands is really quite white due to it being a fine gypsum sand. Part of me wonders if the sand itself flying about affected some of the pictures colorwise but that seems a bit far fetched.

Because of those weird colors, I’ve decided to again make a black and white version of this roll. And honestly I think I still like the same pictures for the most part, at least in regards to White Sands. A big focus for the pictures I was taking at White Sands was exploring the use of telephoto lenses in regards to landscape pictures in particular. As a result I took a 200mm lens along with a 28-105mm zoom lens along with me and most of the pictures were either at 105mm or 200mm. In addition to the telephoto exploration a handful of these pictures were very specifically timed for use with shadows, namely the picture in the top right corner and the one just left of it. I’d go so far as to say that those two pictures in particular are ones I greatly prefer in black and white instead of in color. The blues and purples distract from the light contrast. However, for the second picture in I’d also argue that the color picture does a better job of focusing on the small person in the frame. Something about them just stands out a tiny bit more and is a bit more obviously person like. I’m not entirely sure why.

Overall I wish I had more time at White Sands to take pictures, especially on a day with more striking light contrasts. It’s definitely a place I’d be willing to go and explicitly shoot in black and white instead of in color. While the endless dunes make for a strange landscape, there’s a lot of peace to them and I’d love to explore them a bit more.

Going to the Santa Fe botanical garden pictures, honestly while I rated some of these relatively well, it’s a bit of a bland set of pictures. Mostly I was interested in using a set of macro filters that I happened to find and buy in Carlsbad. There are more pictures with those filters coming up that I hope are a bit more interesting than these pictures. But all that said I did enjoy the botanical gardens, though they were pretty small. It’s a nice and refreshing place to visit. I think I’ll leave this roll there considering I’m not super interested in any other pictures in particular.