A wonder of the world in Colombia

     I went to Colombia this past December and I invited Hillary Dubie, a very good photographer friend of mine from Hallmark,  to Colombia to spend a few days with my family.  I was so pumped she had decided to go to Colombia so I could show her all the beauty it had to offer as well as show her that the bad rep Colombia has of being a dangerous country is all a lie.

    My family is from a small town on the outskirts of Colombia's capital, Bogota.  Next to where we're from there's another town Zipaquira and it has one of the wonders of the world, a Cathedral made out of salt.  When I say made of of salt I mean just about everything is made of salt, you can lick; the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the alters, some of the statues, and it will taste like salt.

   The mountains that Zipaquira are located are full of salt so after time the miners there made a chapel that then turned into a church and then into a Cathedral.  The Cathedral you visit now in days is not the original one, the first one started to fall apart so the miners made a second one that is located more then a mile underneath the ground.  These mines are still being worked and pull out tons of salt each day.

     My also family had a few friends from the States that had went to Colombia with us, so this day I was to be the "tour guild" while visiting the Cathedral.  They wanted me to take pictures of them while we were there, I didn't mine and I am a photographer that is my job so that would be fun.  The only thing is they wanted me to be in it.  I'm not a big fan of tourist pictures, stand if front of an object or place and take a picture type thing,  but they instead so I did.  The mines are extramily dark, they are caves after all, so to get a good shot I had to bump my ISO high, shoot wide open, drag the shutter, use a speedlite and on top of it all put the camera on self timer so I could run in and get in the shot.

(I was shooting with a Canon 5D markII and most shots were ISO-1600, f-4, shutter speed 1/40, Canon 580exii speedlite ETTL -3, and camera on a 10 sec timer)

     The image above is us drinking Colombian coffee a mile into the ground.  In the image below we're about half way down the mine and the yellow area you see on the right, that's where we were in the above shot drink coffee.