‘Birds’ is a San Francisco work from the ‘Salt' series by the London based aerial photographer Tommy Clarke. Hanging out of a helicopter, in 2014 Tommy flew around the Western United States circling over Utah and San Francisco's salt lakes in search of the perfect photographic composition. The results are remarkable and, like the ‘Useless Loop’ series over Western Australia, they left no need to retouch or manipulate the final photograph.

Each image is rich with a variety of textures from the salt extraction process, while the striking natural colours produced by the varying salinity in each lake jump out of the image like an abstract canvas by Mark Rothko. And the continual shift in salt levels and regular extraction process creates a landscape that is unique to the moment that it was captured.