Salt and stillness
There is a backstory to this image. The day before, we came out from a dive near this location to witness a glorious sunset, with streaks of all manners of color in the sky. In addition, there was absolutely no wind, which nearly never happens, creating a perfect reflection in the salt water flats. Unfortunately, I don't have that image because I was there with my macro lens inside my underwater housing.
Lightning doesn't generally strike twice, but I really hoped it would just this once. So the next day we went to the same location at the same time. I brought my wide angle lens and my tripod because I was planning to mount it on top of the truck to get a better angle (and to avoid some of the uninteresting road in the image). Fortunately, the wind was dead calm again, but while the sky colors were more than OK, they weren't quiet the blaze of the previous night. Nevertheless, I was excited to have the luck to get this shot, only to discover that I left at home my bracket that enables the camera to be mounted to the tripod. Normally, I would just leave the bracket on the camera. But it has to come off to place it in the underwater housing and I simply forgot to put it back on.
So the solution was for me to stand on top of the cabin of the truck, hold my hands above my head and snap off the images I wanted to stitch into a pano. Any non-photographer would have thought I was crazy. Oh, and ironically, I ended up using my macro lens for the shot.
So what are we looking at ... these are salt mounds produced by Cargill in the salt flats in southern Bonaire. It is a simple process. Put seawater into a large pool, let it evaporate, harvest the salt that is leftover. Although this sea salt would be great for cooking, it is all used on roads up North in the winter.
Each pyramid is roughly 15 meters high and contains approximately 10,000 metric tons of 99.6 percent pure salt.
Salt and stillness
There is a backstory to this image. The day before, we came out from a dive near this location to witness a glorious sunset, with streaks of all manners of color in the sky. In addition, there was absolutely no wind, which nearly never happens, creating a perfect reflection in the salt water flats. Unfortunately, I don't have that image because I was there with my macro lens inside my underwater housing.
Lightning doesn't generally strike twice, but I really hoped it would just this once. So the next day we went to the same location at the same time. I brought my wide angle lens and my tripod because I was planning to mount it on top of the truck to get a better angle (and to avoid some of the uninteresting road in the image). Fortunately, the wind was dead calm again, but while the sky colors were more than OK, they weren't quiet the blaze of the previous night. Nevertheless, I was excited to have the luck to get this shot, only to discover that I left at home my bracket that enables the camera to be mounted to the tripod. Normally, I would just leave the bracket on the camera. But it has to come off to place it in the underwater housing and I simply forgot to put it back on.
So the solution was for me to stand on top of the cabin of the truck, hold my hands above my head and snap off the images I wanted to stitch into a pano. Any non-photographer would have thought I was crazy. Oh, and ironically, I ended up using my macro lens for the shot.
So what are we looking at ... these are salt mounds produced by Cargill in the salt flats in southern Bonaire. It is a simple process. Put seawater into a large pool, let it evaporate, harvest the salt that is leftover. Although this sea salt would be great for cooking, it is all used on roads up North in the winter.
Each pyramid is roughly 15 meters high and contains approximately 10,000 metric tons of 99.6 percent pure salt.