Pass the Salt
When you spend the past 8 years photographing the same couple-hundred mile area, it can be hard to find the motivation to keep taking photos of the same things. Seascapes: check. Cityscapes: check. Flowers: check. Throw in a wrinkle, though, and things get interesting again. So when DJI started making drones that could take amazing still photography, I was interested.
Willie and I both picked up drones during Black Friday and we've been re-exploring areas from the skies now. It's amazing how the scene can change when you get just a hundred feet off the ground. Looking down on the ground shows a different angle, and most particularly, allows you to see the shape and texture of the whole landscape. Rivers and streams whose true length gets lost from the ground, creates amazing shapes that dazzle when viewed from the sky.
Willie and I arrived at these salt flats for sunrise after visiting the same spot a few days earlier at sunset. We knew the salt flats were creating some amazing textures and we hoped the sunrise glow would give some beautiful and unique light. As the water drains from these salt flats, the little streams left behind create some amazing textures. As the salt builds up on the edges it can catch the light from the rising sun, giving the stream-banks a bit of an orange glow. I loved how you can see that here as the "fingers" extend out, ready to grab you.
DJI Mavic Pro 2 w/Hasselblad L1D-20c:
10.26mm, f/5.6, 1/50 sec, ISO 100