Useless Loop Salt Mine, Shark Bay, Western Australia
Fujifilm GFX100S II, 55mm lens, f3.6 @ 1/2000 second, ISO 80

I first photographed Useless Loop more than a decade ago when shooting an ND5 project - Shark Bay Inscription. Along with Les Walkling, Tony Hewitt, Christian and Michael Fletcher, we'd brought a plane up to the air strip behind Denham (and from memory we'd towed a couple of drums of aviation fuel as well). Michael had told me how magical Shark Bay was from the air - and he wasn't wrong!

Today, Shark Bay is becoming one of the world's most popular destinations for aerial photography and possibly its most photographed location is the salt mine opposite Denham. From the air, the mine is a wonderful mosaic of crystalliser ponds and, depending on the mining cycle, they can be full of water - or very little. As I understand it, the ponds are 'harvested' once a year.

As all the ponds are usually in different states, they display different colours and textures. Wind (or lack of wind) can also affect how the ponds look and the texture (ripples, sea foam) forming on the shallow waters above. While the mine covers 130 square kilometres, the smaller ponds congregated near the coast are the most popular, their embankments creating natural borders. By flying a little lower or using a longer lens, I like to frame tightly, giving the impression that the pattern of ponds extends out forever.

In post-production, I've tweaked the colours of the various ponds and enhanced the texture. It looks like these ponds have been recently scraped for the salt. The top left pond is about the correct colour, the blue a little strengthened and the others changed to a hue I liked the look of. When I look back on my photograph of Useless Loop from 13 years ago, the approach is much the same today, but it was a whole lot easier to select each pond using the AI masking found in Lightroom and Capture One! (A little refinement is still needed for a final file, but this is just fine for social media and the website.)

If you're interested in aerial photography and how I capture the images (before the post-production), there's an eBook available on the Better Photography Education website. Check it out here - it's very reasonably priced!