This is one of those places where I didn’t think I would ever go if it wasn’t for being in the military. I knew there were some places I would have liked to have seen in Israel but I didn’t think that I would ever make the trip to specifically go here on my own. Fortunately, our ship had a port visit at the city of Eilat in Israel. Eilat wasn’t anything crazy, just a few bars and shopping malls, but from there we were able to take little tour buses around some key spot in Israel. The Dead Sea happened to be one of those places. This place was real wild to visit because I had seen pictures of it before but I never thought that it would actually look like all of them in reality. You can see from the picture what the edge of the beach actually looked like. It as this really hard salt that covered all the rocks touching the water. It was the coolest thing ever. They even had these buckets of mud that you could cover yourself in. The way it worked was you were supposed to cover yourself in the mud from the water and then go take a dip and wash it all over and when you got out your skin would be silky smooth. It worked exactly like that too. I had never had smoother skin in my life. The only drawbacks were that the water tasted absolutely horrible if you happen to accidentally get a mouthful and it burned any kind of open cuts or scratches. Besides that, it was awesome. I looked like a weirdo shooting this picture because everyone else was in the water floating around and I was just setting up my tripod off to the side but I didn’t care. I ended up covering myself in mud and jumping in once I was done but the photo was my first priority. I took this shot as an HDR in order to get the best dynamic range. I used bracketing with +2, 0, -2. I stitched the photos together in Photomatix and processed the whole picture in Photoshop CS6. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions!
