449 - Las Coloradas
Alright, alright, alright! So by now you’re wondering if our COVID had kicked in yet. The very COVID we had (unknowingly) caught a few days prior on Christmas. We were in the middle of nowhere. And that is precisely when the COVID started to kick in.
Tyler woke up with it. At first he thought it was allergies, because he’d been in tip top shape the night before. He’d destroyed all of us at Monopoly.
But as the day progressed, he got much worse. What started as a stuffy nose slowly morphed into full-blown fatigue. He could barely even walk, and sat for hours on the side of the dirt road dazed in our flower lawn chair. We started to ponder the idea of it being COVID, because it was still just a couple days after our drunken adventure at Coco Bongo on Christmas Day.
The place had been packed, wall to wall. If COVID was anywhere in Cancun, it was there.
The only thing was we’d all had COVID before. Ironically enough, we all three caught it together on Halloween night the year prior. Shouldn’t natural immunity have protected us, not to mention the Pfizer vaccines we’d gotten before leaving the States?
Who knows. Maybe we should just stop hanging out together on holidays.
Either way, it wasn’t a good situation. We were hours from Cancun, and all three of us were living in a van together for the week. It was Tyler’s first time doing #vanlife, and Haley and I were bound to catch whatever he had… Haley was even starting to get a sore throat.
We looked around at our surroundings. There was a lagoon, flamingos, and a pink lake.
Shit. I should probably introduce you to our surroundings. We were at Las Coloradas, which was at the very top of the Yucatan.
The area was essentially a salt mine that doubled as a lagoon, which for some chemical reason created a strange pink water and attracted flamingos. It was quite the cool sight- even if the security guard was a bit of a pain in the ass.
See, the whole area is technically owned by the mine company, and a few years ago the location when viral on social media. The company didn’t take it well, and rightfully so. The place became swarmed with self-entitled Instagrammers.
So they did what any company would do, and hired a guy on a motorcycle to drive down the street and yell at anyone that stepped one foot on the property.
Luckily, we had long lenses.
For context to these upcoming photos, you need to know that the pink lake only exists in a small portion of the area, which isn’t the part with the flamingos. Our plan was to shoot the flamingos for sunset, and the pink lake for sunrise. Assuming we didn’t wake up sick as hell like Tyler.
Since he was passed out in a pink lawn chair on the side of the road, we decided to get started.
My first photo was of the ground. Go figure. I noticed some muddy cracks that were stricken with flamingo feathers. It made the perfect context shot:
“War of the Flamingos”
Taken with Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
[ISO 50 ~ 43mm ~ f/8 ~ 1/400s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
The funny thing about that photo was that it started with just the cracks. Then I saw the feathers and zoomed out. And THEN I saw the red plant and zoomed out even more. It reminded me of those red vines from that War of the Worlds flick with Tom Cruise a few years back. I used to love that movie.
Which leads me to my first lesson of the shoot, in regards to macro scenes. Instead of shooting one texture, find TWO textures and photograph how they intertwine. It can add a massive amount of interest to a scene- try it if you’re ever stuck with one boring texture.
We kept walking. It was time to shoot the flamingos.
Within about 15 minutes, I realized I’d never seen a flamingo fly before. I didn’t even know they could fly- I’d only ever seen them at the zoo. So when two took off into thin air, I lost my shit:
"Opposites Attract”
Taken with Sony a7rIII + Sony 70-200mm f/2.8
[ISO 50 ~ 200mm ~ f/2.8 ~ 1/1250s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
I snagged about 30 photos of just those two. But I settled on that one because of how their wings were completely opposite of each other. It was a fitting, yin yang kinda dealio.
The hardest part was shooting with only my 200mm lens. The dude on the motorcycle had yelled at us twice now for being to far into the property, and I didn’t want to find out what would happen if we warned us a third time.
Haley was shooting with a 500mm lens her mom gave her, and I was jealous. I’ve always wanted to invest in a longer lens, but I’ve only had about three instances in the past 449 shoots where I really wanted one. And this was one of them.
Any type of moderately interesting wildlife photography basically requires at least 200mm lenses. Else you’re stuck to shooting squirrels and the occasional deer.
But I made due… I just had to find a point where I could be as close as possible to the flamingos, shoot full-frame 42mp, and crop to oblivion. Here’s my favorite shot of them up close:
"Double Twist”
Taken with Sony a7rIII + Sony 70-200mm f/2.8
[ISO 80 ~ 198mm ~ f/2.8 ~ 1/500s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Again, I enjoyed the symmetry in that shot. I couldn’t bring myself to just post a bare bones photo of a single flamingo.
Moving on, I’m actually really excited to show you my favorite photo of the session. I’d describe it, but I’ll just show you:
“Flamingo Paradise”
Taken with Sony a7rIII + Sony 70-200mm f/2.8
[ISO 200 ~ 200mm ~ f/2.8 ~ 1/2000s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Basically all the conditions lined up perfectly for the shot. The sun went behind the cloud at the perfect time, the birds flew over, the foreground water emerged, and I ran alongside a flamingo until it was perfectly aligned. To make the scene perfect, I exposure blended the perfect flamingo with the perfect cloud, and clone stamped out some excess flamingos. Both shots happened within moments of each other.
I learned here that the clone stamp tool is way better for choppy water than the healing brush.
Soon after, the sun disappeared and we called it a day. We setup camp on the beach and passed out early.
Luckily, we woke up the next morning without any COVID symptoms. Well, I didn’t. Tyler and Haley did… But since Haley only had a mild sore throat, we went to the pink lake to shoot anyway.
I’m going to be honest and say I didn’t get a single good shot. There was only one lowsy view of the lake that was free, and the salt company wanted a couple hundred pesos to show us more. Since they wouldn’t allow us to bring our real cameras on the tour, we said fuckkkkkk that and jetted out of there. We already had a bunch of flamingo shots in the bag.
Solid sesh, I’d say.. besides the impending COVID doom. But hey, not a bad way to spend the second to last shoot of 2021.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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