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Editor\u2019s Note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex\u2019s Perpetual Planet Initiative<\/a> has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.<\/p>\n When Lisa Michele Burns<\/a> set out to photograph Australia in 2022, she didn\u2019t quite realize how enormous it was.<\/p>\n She recalled a growing sense of panic on the second of her two four-month road trips as she drove down the never-ending highway to the outback, surrounded by nothing but rust-orange dirt, spiky spinifex grass, and the occasional gray-green mulga tree.<\/p>\n \u201cThat road, it\u2019s just \u2014 it\u2019s so straight,\u201d said Burns. \u201cThere was a point where I had to pull over and go, \u2018What are we doing? This place is so big.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Despite growing up in Australia \u2014 moving from its southern coastline, where bushland rolls into the sea, up to the Whitsunday Islands in central Queensland \u2014 Burns, 40, has spent most of her career abroad, capturing images of Alpine peaks, serene bamboo forests and Mediterranean coastlines.<\/p>\n \u201cI probably knew more about Greenland than I did the center of Australia,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But during the coronavirus pandemic, she found herself at home, unable to travel abroad. \u201cIt became an opportunity for me to see Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n Focusing on the \u201cvibrant color palette\u201d of Australia\u2019s landscapes, Burns traversed the country, accompanied by her partner, to capture its diversity, from ocean blues to white sand beaches, dense green forests to rich red desert plains.<\/p>\n Exploring places she\u2019d never visited, Burns found a new appreciation for her birthplace \u2014 and hopes that the images, compiled in her photobook, \u201cSightlines<\/a>,\u201d published last December by Images Publishing Group, can preserve the \u201cindescribable magic\u201d of Australia\u2019s landscapes while sparking conversations about how to protect much-beloved natural wonders.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s important to appreciate the variety of landscapes across Australia, but to also document them as they are today, because they are changing,\u201d said Burns.<\/p>\nExploring hidden gems<\/h3>\n