Photographer Reuben Wu continues his stunning “Lux Noctis” series with a new collection of images capturing illuminated drone paths over Bolivia’s eerie salt flat landscape. This time, he got to use some cool new equipment: Phase One’s 150-megapixel XT camera system, which costs $57,000.

Phase One sponsored the project, sending Wu to the extraordinary landscape for a set of photos that look more alien than ever.

“My favorite memory from the trip to Bolivia is shooting the salt flats at sunset. The salt crystallizes into beautiful polygon shapes stretching into the horizon and, as the sun was setting, the shadows cast by the glowing salt ridges became longer and longer, and so the landscape would look different every few seconds. Being there and watching the landscape change as the sunset moved across it, that feeling just stuck with me.”

“A lot of my photos created with drone lights feature circles. To me, this shape represents renewal and perfection. With the image above, I wanted to feature the circle within the landscape of Bolivia’s salt flats. Having the light really low on the salt flats created an interesting mood, with the glow emanating from it and the shadows cast on the ground.”

Another series, Aeroglyphs, takes a more geometric approach with large shapes traced in the sky, contrasting with ethereal settings.

Previously, we covered the UFO-style patterns in the skies Wu created for LUX NOCTIS II. The photographer (who’s also a founding member of the band Ladytron) has traveled the world seeking out the most dramatic, high impact landscapes he could find and flying LED-equipped drones overhead to illuminate them after dark.

“It’s so easy to become numb to conventional depictions of beautiful nature,” he said at the time. “In casting a new, unfamiliar light, I want people to see that while other planets are fascinating and incredible to us through the eyes of spacecraft and rovers, it is our own planet which has so much grandeur and beauty which is both accessible to us and worthy of preservation and protection.”

You can read more about Wu’s work in Bolivia at the Phase One website.

Pretty much anything that can be hollowed out and made light-proof can be used as a camera. Just ask Brendan Barry, who’s made a career from transforming ordinary objects like watermelon, bread, logs, mannequins and boxes made of Legos into unconventional photography equipment.

Barry’s creations got bigger and and cooler than ever in 2017 when he transformed an old caravan he purchased for $200 into a mobile camera and portable darkroom. Now, he’s back with a project that builds on that idea. He describes his shipping container camera as “the world’s biggest, slowest, and most impractical polaroid camera.”

That may be so, but it’s still really cool, and the photos have a sort of hazy, dreamy quality that make them feel like antiques. As seen in a documentary by Exploredinary, the shipping container camera has a custom-made rear door with a built-in lens, which pulls into place to make its black-painted interior a camera. It’s also used as a darkroom, gallery and a space for holding workshops.

Barry set up the shipping container camera at Northernhay Gardens in Exeter for about two and a half weeks, taking photos of subjects who wandered up and volunteered. He thinks part of the charm of the resulting photos comes from the fact that people are accustomed to having their photos taken by a conventional camera, but something about these quirky handmade cameras lowers their guard.

Barry says his work is “mostly concerned with the transformation of different objects and environments into spaces capable of viewing and capturing a photographic image, using the mechanics of photography as a tool for exploration and collaboraiton.”

Check out the rest of his work at BrendanBarry.com and on Instagram @brendanbarryphoto.

How much of the Earth’s beauty – natural and human-created – do we miss every day, because it’s only visible from above? Photographer duo (and brothers) JP and Mike Andrews reveal some of the incredible sights and patterns that become apparent when viewed from the sky, calling their work “abstract aerial art.” Using a pair of drones called the DJI Phantom 4 Pro and DJI Mavic 2 Pro, the brothers find scenes that almost seem too perfect to be real.

It all began in 2016 when the UK-based photographers visited Australia and wondered how much more they could see of remote locations from overhead. They bought their first drone and headed to the outback, amazed by what they found.

“From the perspective of our drone, we saw the textures of the earth for the first time. The swirl of patterns, symmetry and colours. Instantly, we were drawn to the unusual sights we were witnessing from above. Each changing landscape exposed the truly weird and wonderful world we live in. The more we photographed them, the more we couldn’t believe what we were seeing!”

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“Pointing the camera on the drone directly downwards towards the earth, was the perspective that intrigued us the most. We referred to it between ourselves as the ‘topdown‘ perspective. It was a view that we had very rarely seen before and it really suited the types of images we were taking. We focused on shooting each landscape we discovered this way. Seeing the world from this angle, led us to compose our shots as if they were artworks rather than traditional photographs.”

Before long, they developed an eye for spotting locations that would reveal the most dazzling effects from that top-down perspective – roads overtaken by wind-blown sand, rainbow striped tulip fields, stacks of crates on barges that create cityscape shadows on the water, orderly parking lots and perfectly spaced beach umbrellas.

You can see more of their work on Instagram @abstractaerialart, and purchase prints on their website.

Over a period of decades, the waters of Devils Lake slowly rose higher and higher until they enveloped an entire farming town in rural North Dakota, forcing its inhabitants to leave. Changes to the climate resulted in heavier rain, which spread across thousands of flat acres “like pouring water on a tabletop,” says photographer Paul Johnson, who grew up in a similar community not so far away. Johnson went back to his home state to document the town of Devils Lake in two seasons: winter and summer.

Located in a closed glacial basin unconnected to rivers, Devils Lake has been vulnerable to both flooding and almost completely disappearing over time, but it first began breeching the towns along its borders after long rainy period starting in 1993. The lake doubled in size by 1999. Farmers described the process as “a slow death,” watching their fields and eventually their homes and outbuildings succumb.

Though many of those structures have since collapsed, some are still standing, completely surrounded by water that freezes when the temperature drops.

“Abandoned places hold a wistful appeal to me and I think to many of us,” says Johnson in an interview with Passion Passport. “They are the final chapters of unknown stories where we’re left to ponder the details. Their quiet stillness can spur thoughts about the nature of time and the processes of decay and reclamation. In the case of Devil’s Lake, there’s the added element of these places being completely out of their original context. You just don’t expect to see a house or barn sitting in the middle of an enormous shallow lake and the experience is pretty surreal. The loss of so many farms and livelihoods gives the area a melancholy feel as well.”

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If you’re a fan of eerie nature photography and epic travel shots, Johnson’s tumblr and Instagram are well worth a look, documenting trips all over the world.

There’s a quiet sense of foreboding permeating this series of black and white photos of old uranium mining towns and nuclear test sites throughout the West, captured by Australian-American photographer Brett Leigh Dicks. The images depict scenes that once held enormous potential: first for progress, then for danger and destruction. Now they’re just empty. “Atomic Alchemy: Nuclear Landscapes Across the American West” explores how these sites scattered across Utah, Idaho, Arizona and New Mexico rose and fell along with public perception of nuclear power in the early stages of its development and post World War II, after the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The United States Atomic Energy Commission predicted that, by the turn of the 21st century, one thousand reactors would be producing electricity for homes and businesses across the U.S.,” reads Dicks’ artist statement. “The reality was far short of what was promised, as nuclear technology produced a range of problems… not to mention the unresolved difficulties of site decommissioning and water disposal.”

Missile launch centers, uranium mines, atomic bomb loading pits and infamous sites like the Enola Gay Hanger in Utah and the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico are pictured as they stand today in their quiet desert environments. Many are little more than roadside curiosities; the heaviness of their history lingers in the air despite their current state of stillness. Dicks sees them as “an eerie testament to a period of time that was meant to revolutionize civilization.”

The photographer says his primary area of interest “investigates the landscape and the fragile ties that it shares with social progress adn historical significance,” and his previous projects include “explorations of abandoned military complexes, decommissioned prisons, walls constructed from socio-political divides and nuclear landscapes.” Check out more of his work at BrettLeighDicks.com.