a valley Photo | TrekEarth

Photographer’s Note

The Anseba province or Zoba is a mountainous region in the north western range of this beautiful country. Two weeks before taking this shot the predominant colors of this valley were the dry colors of sand. Last week as the rainy season started the valley was transformed into a green one. Many questions arose as traveling around this region. The first one is the impact of us, human beings, on nature. Deforestation is plausible. The second observation is the climatic change on this region. Even if this rainy season is the best in many years the trend is that rain is more and more scarce. Deforestation and failing rain patterns results in the compactation of the upper soil so when the scarce rain comes water is not able to infiltrate and percolate…it just runs off, creating floods and eventually it just evaporates.

linask, happypoppeye, pboehringer, Henryk_Bilor has marked this note useful

Critiques | Translate

happypoppeye (4064) 2007-08-01 14:52

An interesting looking landscape Rolando. One of the first things I noticed was the extremely bright and saturated sky which wouldn't look good on it's own but somewhere gives this photo a dramatic feel. The greenery in the vally has good color and the trails, scattered trees and differing yellows and shades of green combined with the sky make it a very interesting photo.

Good shot.
Nice note also.
John

pboehringer (770) 2007-08-27 8:12

Rolando, this image has great potential, however there would be two things that I would diferently to enhance the outcome. One is something that you would need to do in the field. Use some of the smaller shrubs to have an interesting foreground to provide better depth to your image. The other thing is using a ND grad filter to turn down the intensity of the light in the sky. Latter can also be corrected somewhat with PP by cropping the upper portion of the image until the first part of the mountain at the right side of the image.
Regards, Peter

ein22 (462) 2007-08-29 6:48

Your motive with this photograph is very nice to see on this website.

From those grey patches in the photo I would suggest it's salinity? We have a huge problem right now in Australia due to salinity and it's because of the very reason you were talking about. When there is usually alot of water witheld by plants the salt levels in the soil are constantly flushed and regenerated. Because this area has been cut down of trees water is not holing there for long enough and that makes salt build up on the top soil. The salt ends up killing more plants and with little rain projected it all adds up to a pretty scary figure.

The main water supplier in this country is battling a huge salinity problem. I wish more would be done worldwide to protect the enviroment.

This is a good reminder of what is happening.
Thank you
Andrew

Henryk_Bilor (20371) 2007-09-13 23:59

Hi Rolando
Beautiful place. Impressive valley with all these trees and mountains in the background. Only the sky a bit poor as Peter said ;).
Regards

P.S. Show us more pictures from Urugay, are there no beautiful places? ;)