Tucked into the southwest corner of Utah, not far from Kanab, is a beautiful little state park with a big name: Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.  This image exposes both what’s best about the park – awesome late afternoon light and excellent distant scenery, and what’s not so great – footprints and dune buggy tracks everywhere.  It’s a well-used park, that’s the balance…  The color coral has the sRGB designation of (255,127,80), pink is defined as (255,192,203) , and even coral pink has an sRGB definition, which is (255, 131, 121).  Anyway, the idea is a hue between orange and pale red.  I doubted that there could be sand of such a color, but  it is in fact exactly the right description.  The sand here is derived principally from Navajo Sandstone, which presents itself in a wide variety of hues, from pink to sun-bleached white.  The apparent color of the sand is highly sensitive to the color of the dominant light, and thus varies significantly according to the intensity and character of the ambient illumination.

The image above, looking south, was recorded on August 24, 2009, at 18:30 MST, using the Nikon D700 and the AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED lens at 24mm.  Exposure was f/16 at 1/160s – note that this is 2/3 stop underexposed, which is pretty standard for Nikon systems in brightish light conditions – all of my desert photography is exposure-bracketed, and the images recorded using 2/3 stop of underexposure are consistently the winners of the bracketed sets.

The image above, looking north now, was recorded on August 24, 2009, at 19:30 MST, using the Nikon D700 and the AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED lens at 29mm(?).  Exposure was f/16 at 1/60s .  I believe this image captures the essential ‘coralness’ of the site – note that the color balance was set right off of the WhiBal, and that no there was no adjust of hue.

And of course, let’s not miss the opportunity to include a shot of the HP (below), who although it is not included explicitly in this entry, stood in for a number of color balance verification shots.

Tags: Arizona Strip, Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, Kanab

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