Badwater Basin Sunrise

Badwater Basin Sunrise
This was taken at 6:55 am in the same location as my black and white photo a couple of posts ago, captured at 7:32 pm the night before.  Shooting into the bright oncoming sunrise, I used a graduated neutral density filter to reduce the brightness of the sky and captured three bracketed exposures to improve dynamic range.  I adjusted an image in Adobe Lightroom 5.7, applied that to three exposures and sent them to Photomatix HDR (Soft 2 processing if I remember correctly) to include more shadow and highlight detail in this high contrast lighting, readjusted the resulting TIF file in Lightroom, then sent that result to OnOne Perfect Effects 9 for a final tweak.

This is a large basin where a giant lake evaporated thousands of years ago, and the mineral-rich waters left a deposit of rock salt.  Wind deposits dust on the salt flats, but pools of water dissolve it into salt water, and the dirt settles to the bottom, so when the surface re-crystallizes, it becomes salt white again.  Temperatures here range from low teens F to mid-120s, and expansion and contraction of the surface forms cracks. and ridges  The large white areas are where water apparently became trapped and resurfaced the salt.  I would guess that the rings of white would be where a pool formed long enough to resurface the outside edge of the pool white in a ring, but the center was uplifted or shallow enough that the center of the pool became exposed and dried before it dissolved and re-crystallized to fresh white salt.

These salt flats go on for miles, and you can find a wide variation of interesting patterns if you search long enough.

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Originally shared by Jeff Sullivan

Sunrise over the Salt Flats
This image of an oncoming sunrise was taken in Badwater Basin salt flats in Death Valley National Park last month.  It was adjusted in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.7, Photomatix 5, and on1 PerfectEffects 9.

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