Blueland

November 14, 2007 in Geology, Photography, Places, Travel | 5 comments

I just uploaded some more shots from last week’s flight over Greenland, en route from London to Denver. The last series, of peaks drowning in ice, was shot with the sun below the horizon, behind clouds, or both. Couldn’t tell from my side of the plane. As we flew straight west, however, the sun began to come up again, just peeking over the horizon and illuminating the peaks of mountains above deep fjords bottomed by glaciers, all moving toward the Davis Strait on the west side of the island. The result highlighted the deep blue of dusk in the valleys.

5 comments

jthoagland on November 14, 2007 at 9:57 pm

Wow
Great stuff

I was going to do a snarky comment like : but but but Al Gore said it was melting

Took me back to some flight’s I’ve had
Summer, twilight all night over the artic

Been busy gotta catch up on your stuff
Ciao
Chip
Billy Beck on November 15, 2007 at 7:35 pm

That’s a splendid photograph, Doc. I’m a stage lighting director, and I have to tell you: it’s rare to be able to catch a blue like that in a photograph.

Is that how it looked to your naked eye when you shot it?
Doc Searls on November 16, 2007 at 7:12 am

Billy, that was pretty close. I did enhance the shot by adjusting the color levels in Photoshop — something I often do to overcome atmospheric haze. The scene may have been a bit more golden-brownish owing to diffused dusk light; but the blueness of snow in shadow was quite pronounced, as I recall.

I wish I had a laptop with the horsepower and disk space to allow me to shoot in RAW and do non-destructive editing. Alas, I don’t. Not yet, anyway. (The laptop in this case is a 3-year-old 17″ PowerBook. My other one is a Linux ThinkPad with a hardware problem.) Otherwise I’d just put up the original and let you see (and work with) exactly what the camera saw.
Billy Beck on November 16, 2007 at 11:20 am

It’s beautiful in any case, and it must have been something to look at out the window in order to make you shoot it.

You aerial shots have made me start paying a bit more camera-attention out the windows, now. I have some stuff in archive around here and haven’t begun sorting through it, but I think I’m going to get a little more busy during the ride from now on.

Great stuff.
Doc Searls on November 16, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Thanks, Billy.

The main tricks with shooting out plane windows are 1) be on the shady side of the plane, and 2) be lucky enough to have a window that isn’t too scratched up.

that said, however, I’ve had some great shots through some fairly bad windows. And the best of these shots of the San Gabriel Mountains while flying into Los Angeles were shot through a semi-bad window in the back of a plane, looking over a wing, with the sun shining in. So ya never know.

And yeah, photoshop does help.