Paul Hoelen spends much of the year travelling around Australia photographing landscapes and teaching photography workshops. When he isn’t travelling he calls Tasmania home.
From the photographer:
This the second in a series exploring an abstract aerial interpretation of the salt works of Useless Loop in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area in North West Australia.
The hot climate, harsh sunlight, shallow seabeds and resultant evaporation have created a hyper saline environment with some of the highest natural concentrations of salt in the ocean here in the world.
It weaves a thread through the whole ecosystem and is a formative element in determining the unique flora and fauna here.
Man has since recognized this hyper salinity as a resource and established salt evaporation ponds on Herisson Prong since the early 1960’s – which continue to be active to this day.
From the air an incredible array of subtle pastel tones and graphical lines reveal themselves to draw compositions from and the water itself within the ponds has an almost brushed like quality – like a watermark…
