Jwaneng diamond mine.

I do industrial photography for a long time, and this HDR panorama of the pit of Debswana Jwaneng mine is one of my favorites.

Was not the best time of the day to shoot and the sun was o harsh, the gear was “on”  for few hours in the sun and was “boiling”.

It took 27 photos to stitch, captured 2 stops of light apart, after a lot of tweaking the result was a 46 megapixel panorama. I wish I had with me the pole and the motorized head to get a Birdseye view at the edge, unfortunately is a whole new story to go inside with such heavy gear.

In the full size panorama you can see the drills, excavators, trucks, bulldozers, etc. what I guess will do an amazing large print, but in this resized picture they simply vanished.

The Jwaneng diamond mine is the richest diamond mine in the world by value and is located in south-central Botswana about 120 kilometers west of the city of Gaborone, in the Naledi river valley of the Kalahari. Jwaneng, meaning “a place of small stones”, is owned by Debswana, a partnership between the De Beers company and the government of Botswana, having begun operations in 1982.

Jwaneng is an open pit mine. The high rate of diamond extraction, combined with high quality diamonds fetching excellent per weight prices, make the Jwaneng diamond mine the richest diamond mine in the world by value of recovered diamonds. At the center of the diamond mine, a series of concentric circles cut deeper and deeper into the ground. Surrounding the pit is a network of roads and structures related to the mining operation.

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