This is an image I did while doing some material tests with the new Mental Ray materials in MAX. I have some images that where taken by a professional photographer that I tried to match lighting and placement just to see how realistically the materials and lighting would look. This matches the photograph fairly well I think. The model is a little different but the lighting and materials match pretty well. Here is a link to the photo for comparison http://www.burgoynedesign.com/art/SaltFlats1.jpg.

I used the Mental Ray daylight system with the physical sky shader, MR car paint shader and Arch&Design materials for the rest. The little mountain n the background was just taken out of the photo and placed in the render using Photoshop.