He's being a bit coy about the actual camera but to translate the camera speak, it's an HDR photo - high dynamic range. What that means is that it's not one photo at all - it's actually 9 photos of the same view combined on a computer. Each photo is exposed for different amounts of light, the idea being that you take the best exposed parts of each and combine them into one end result. By doing this he gets the sky to look dark enough to show cloud detail (instead of garishly over exposed or lacking detail), and the land to look bright enough to show some detail (instead of being black).

I'm not a huge fan of HDR images because I always feel they're artificial, but I can't argue with the beauty of the end result in this case. Are these the kinds of photo your son generally takes? Why was he in Panama?