As Ignacio Palacios and I begin to promote our photo tour to Bolivia in July 2019, I asked Ignacio to share one of his favourite photos with us. Here are his notes on his stunning Salar de Uyuni salt lake landscape:

It is a composite image. The top of the image that includes the 4WD and the mountains (Fisher Island) was taken at sunrise and the bottom part of the image with the typical salt plain hexagons was taken at sunset.

The reason why I had to do a composite image is because I only spent one night in Uyuni and that morning at sunrise I could not find the composition that I had in mind (with a strong marked hexagonal line following a diagonal).

That morning, there were also a lot of 4WD wheel marks on the salt hexagons in the area where we parked our car to take a few photos at sunrise. It was so dark that I could not see them, but they ruined most of my photographs. In fact, there were so many 4WDs driving around Uyuni that it was very difficult to find a location without marks...and it would have been a very tedious task to clone them.

Because I wasn’t completely happy with the shots I took in the morning, I asked the driver to take me again for sunset. I was the only photographer on the tour keen enough to come back to the salt plains again for a sunset shot. We had to look for a while until I found what I wanted and then we waited for the sun to set...

Apart from saturating, slightly changing the colour of the salt lake and highlighting the diagonal, I haven´t touched this image very much.

Naturally, I'm keen to get to Salar de Uyuni and find some shots like this. The image won Ignacio first prize in the LUX Awards in Spain and did well in Australian awards too - so I will need to find something different!