Spring Trip 2019 – Part 1 – Monahans Sandhills State Park, Texas – continued

Before I continue with photography within this park, I will offer a brief review of the park and facilities.  There was some work being done at the visitor center at the entrance, when I was there.  This required one to go into the center to confirm one’s arrival and pay any fees that were due, rather than pay in the typical way at a reception window.  However, I was a bit confused by the signage at the entrance, thinking that I needed to drive on into the park to find the place to check in.  So I continued, following the signs to the camping area.  Upon getting to the RV area, I found a ranger helping another RVer with a big rig get into his assigned spot.  He came over to chat with me for awhile and told me how to best get to my reserved spot and told me I had a good spot adjacent to a sand dune on one side.  He also told me that he could come by, when he made his early morning rounds, and take me back to the visitor center to check in.  I informed him that I would probably be in the dunes in the early morning hours and late day hours.  I did not tell him why and he did not ask, but he looked a bit confused, since apparently few visitors get out that early into the dunes.  Anyway, even though I saw him passing by my place during my subsequent stay, he never stopped by and I never got any note on my vehicle, even though I did not have the typical sticker or receipt that the parks require on vehicles within the park.  I did stop by the visitor center as I was leaving the park to be sure all was ok and I was informed that all my fees were paid by the online reservation and I was all set to go.  I knew that I had paid the campsite fee, but I still thought that I had to pay the entrance fee, since my annual membership card was expired.

This is an old park and the facilities need some refurbishing, especially the restrooms and showers.  The showers are open with no privacy doors.  The shower water valves do not operate the way I expected and I initially thought there was no hot water.  This is a sandy place and visitors using the showers naturally leave much sand in the shower area.

The park is just north of I-20 and a railway that parallels I-20.  Being in the heart of the Permian Basin, there is much oil field truck traffic on I-20 and there were numerous trains passing by through out the night, so it can be rather noisy at night.  I must admit that the train whistle sound during the night was a bit nostalgic, since I recall hearing these during the night in my childhood home.

The days were mostly pleasantly cool during my visit, but the late night and early mornings were cold.  Even with chemical hand warmers in my fleece mittens, that opened to fingerless mode so that I could operate the camera controls, my finger tips got numb, especially just before sunrise, when I need them to not be so numb.

Apparently, there is much night life activity in the sand dunes, too.  The evidence of such is reflected by the many animal tracks in the sand, especially in the early morning hours before people walk through the dunes, disturbing the surface.

In the late day excursions into the sandhills, I could hear coyotes yelping and they did not seem very far away.  I saw numerous coyote tracks in the dunes, so I’m sure they were hunting prey in the night time hours within the dunes.

You might note that all of the images above are created by focus stacking a number of images in Photoshop.  I like doing this to get sharpness through out an image, but there can be problems with doing this.  In particular, if there is motion, such as movement of vegetation or clouds, while taking a series of shots, the focus stacking might not work out well.  Since I knew I had this taking place in many of my shots, I inspected the results of each focus stacked image.  If there were movement effects noted, I would either abandon the focus stack method or try again with different photos.  If the movement effects were far in the background, where the image is not extremely sharp, anyway, I might ignore that and keep the resultant image.  This is ok as long as the image is not enlarged to such an extent that the movement or misalignment is apparent.  This is just a judgement call one has to make for such shots.  I’ve also noted that Photoshop sometimes selects the portions of images that it uses in the focus stack in what appears to be a non logical way, with blobs of images included within an area where most of a separate image is selected.  I’m sure that this is just a limitation of the software’s ability to distinguish sharpness for some portions of an image.  This might be corrected by manually stacking the images, but that gets into a lot more work in the editing process.

In a couple of my initial focus stacked images, I noted glaring misalignments that could not be attributed to motion.  Upon inspecting the original images, I noted that even though I typically sync adjustments across the images to be used in the focus stack process, the lens profile correction did not get applied to all images.  This might have been my error, not the software’s problem.  Upon correcting this, the focus stack misalignment issue went away.  So just something else to be aware of when using this technique.

Readers might note that this is a great place to use the “leading lines” technique in photography.  There are very evident lines of multiple kinds in most of these photographs that serve to lead the eye through the photos.

I like the long shadows streaking through the late day sunlit highlights on the dunes and the numerous animal tracks in the sands in this shot.

In the photo above, I am not pleased with he sky.  Note that it is very blue on the right and much too bright on the left.  I first considered cropping to remove the sky, but I did not think I could get a pleasing crop.  Subsequently, I considered deleting this photo due to its obvious defect, but then I thought that this can be an example from which to learn.  The dark blue is probably due to the effect of the polarizing filter in a wide angle shot.  I usually try to minimize this effect, but I apparently neglected to do so in this shot.  I do not specifically remember using a graduated neutral density filter in this shot, but I think it most probable that I did.  I tried to edit the sky color to even it out a bit, but I did not like the results, so I just left it as it was.  Someone with great patience and skill in Photoshop could probably fix the sky, but I’m not so inclined.

I still have a few images from this park to share, so it looks like I will need to continue this in a separate post or two.

Ken