aerial

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Let’s say you want to improve the Wikipedia page for Clayton Indiana with an aerial photograph. Feel free to use the one above. That’s why I shot it, posted it, and licensed it permissively. It’s also why I put a helpful caption under it, and some call-outs in mouse-overs.

It’s also why I did the same with Danville, Indiana:

Also Brownsville, Indiana, featuring the Brickyard VORTAC station (a navigational beacon used by aircraft):

Eagle Creek Park, the largest in Indianapolis, and its Reservoir:

The district of Indianapolis charmlessly called Park 100:

The White River, winding through Indianapolis:

Where the White River joins and the Wabash, which divides Southern Indiana from Southern Illinois (which is on the far side here, along with Mt. Carmel):

Among other places.

These were shot on the second leg of a United flight from Seattle to Indianapolis by way of Houston. I do this kind of thing on every flight I take. Partly it’s because I’m obsessed with geography, geology, weather, culture, industry, infrastructure, and other natural things. And partly it’s to provide a useful service.

I don’t do it for the art, though sometimes art happens. For example, with this shot of salt ponds at the south end of San Francisco Bay:

Airplane windows are not optically ideal for photography. On the contrary, they tend to be scratched, smudged, distorted, dirty, and worse. Most of the photos above were shot through a window that got frosty and gray at altitude and didn’t clear until we were close to landing. The air was also hazy. For cutting through that I can credit the dehaze slider in Adobe Photoshop 2021. I can also thank Photoshop for pulling out color and doing other things that make bad photos useful, if not good in the artsy sense. They fit my purpose, which is other people’s purposes.

In addition to Adobe, I also want to tip my hat toward Sony, for making the outstanding a7iv mirrorless camera and the 24-105mm f/4 FE G OSS lens I used on this flight. Also Flickr, which makes it easy to upload, organize, caption, tag, and annotate boundless quantities of full- (and other-) size photos—and to give them Creative Commons licenses. I’ve been using Flickr since it started in 2005, and remain a happy customer with two accounts: my main one, and another focused on infrastructure.

While they are no longer in a position to care, I also want to thank the makers of iView MediaPro, Microsoft Expressions and PhaseOne MediaPro for providing the best workflow software in the world, at least for me. Alas, all are now abandonware, and I don’t expect any of them to work on a 64-bit operating system, which is why, for photographic purposes, I’m still sitting on MacOS Mojave 10.14.6.

I’m hoping that I can find some kind of substitute when I get a new laptop, which will inevitably come with an OS that won’t run the oldware I depend on. But I’ll save that challenge for a future post.

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Hey, this is cool: CoolLAj Magazine includes this shot in La La Land at It’s Best: Photos of LA:

It was near the end of a series of flights from Copenhagen to Santa Barbara, and easily the best of the bunch.

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saltpond

Before the salt in evaporating sea water turns white, it goes through stages of color that range from jade green to brick red, with variations of orange, yellow and other colors. From above the salt ponds around San Francisco Bay look like giant panes of stained glass. The shot above is from my latest set, shot on approach to SFO last week.

Here’s another series.

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bypassbridge

The shot above, made on Sunday out the window of a plane on approach to Las Vegas, comes three and a half years after this shot, which I took from the ground at Hoover Dam. Here’s a whole set of the fly-by. Not much of the dam shows. The Colorado River gorge is easier to see.

Two things stand out for me in this scene. One is the remarkable engineering involved in building the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, better known as the Hoover Dam Bypass. The other is that, from altitude — far more than from the ground — you can see the volcanic nature and origin of the rock supporting both the bridge and hte dam. I’ve been looking around for source docs online that detail the provenance of this rock, which needs to be of a competence sufficient to anchor one of the world’s biggest dams, while also supporting a bridge over a gorge. As I recall from the visit, it’s rhyolite. But, not sure. Looks like it. Maybe Arizona Geology can fill us in.

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Flying from Boston to Minneapolis by way of Chicago today. The second leg is through the middle of this:

Shouldn’t be much to see out the window.

But I’m looking forward to talking tomorrow morning at MinneWebCon. The title is The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power. I gave a shorter talk by the same title to a small group at the Berkman Center a couple weeks back. The video and audio are here. This one will be for Web development folks rather than the somewhat academic folks that come to Berkman lunches. Should be fun.

I also expect to be hanging Monday night with other folks interested in seeing Carolina beat Michigan State in the NCAA championship game. 🙂

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Got these shots of St. Louis and the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers while flying to Austin by way of Chicago two Fridays ago. You can see the Gateway Arch, right of center, Busch Stadium, the Edward Jones Dome, the City Museum, and lots of barge traffic on the river.

I actually didn’t see much of St. Louis. My window seat didn’t have well-placed windows, and I couldn’t see downward in any case. But my little Canon Powershot 850 could look for me. So I held it against one of the windows, angled it downward, and shot away, checking from time to time on the back of the camera to see if my shots were accurate. Didn’t do too poorly, considering.

What I want is a small camera like this one that can shoot RAW without taking forever to do it. (As was the case with my old and much missed Nikon Coolpix 5700, which also featured a flip-out viewer, making shots like this much easier.) The PS 850 has no RAW mode, and its processing is rather thick with artifacts. Still, fun to use.

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Sitting by Gate 88 at SFO, waiting to board United’s next Boston flight. I just took my chances and ordered a short dry decaf cappuccino. I figured I had a good chance of getting what I wanted because the coffee shop at the gate is Peets, of which I am quite fond because more often than not they make them right.

Not this time. Even with careful instruction (“just some foam and a tiny bit of milk on the espresso”), I got what remains the default for coffee shops everywhere, and which I’ve complained about before.

It’s cool. I just met Tony Mamone, founder of Zimbio, who introduced himself after he heard my name called for an upgrade. Fun coincidence.

So now I’m sitting in seat 1a: a biz class window on the shady side of the plane with no obstructions. The window could be cleaner, but it’s not too bad. The shooting should be good.

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So I’m here in the Bolt Bus from Boston to New York. There’s wi-fi on board, and power outlets in the backs of most seats. But the wi-fi is slow, so I’m on a Sprint EvDO card. Getting about 1Mb down and .6Mb up. Not bad.

Anyway, I’ve recently uploaded a pile of photo sets to Flickr, where my inventory of photos is now approaching 26,000. Here is a list of just a few sets, mostly shot from airplanes and other moving vehicles:

Wow. It’s snowing now. Hard. We’re still in Connecticut, approaching the Westchester border. The Weather.com map is quite colorful:

Hm. Not taking. Guess I need a separate post for it.

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Got some nice shots of San Francisco and Marin on Sunday, as we flew off to Chicago on the first leg of the trip home from Thanksgiving in California. Actually, my kid shot most of them, since he had the window seat. Shot some other stuff too, which I’ll put up later.

Mount Tamalpias (better known as Mt. Tam) looms in the background, and Mt. Beacon in front of it.

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These are a few among the many salt ponds that ring the south end of San Francisco Bay. Once considered and agricultural innovation and an economic boom, the practice of “reclaiming” wild wetlands for industrial purposes is now considered ecologically awful by environmentalists, especially here on the West Coast of the U.S., which has precious few wetlands in any case. Many environmentalists have been working to get Cargill to close the ponds and return the Bay to its more natural state. Cargill hasn’t budged. In fact, <a href=”http://www.cargill.com/sf_bay/saltpond_ecosystem.htm”>Cargill has its own views</a> on the matter, plus some interesting facts about the ponds themselves.

It’s worth pointing out that the Bay is actually one of the youngest features on the California landscape, having flooded within only in the last couple thousand years, as sea levels rose. (Global warming has been happening, in fact, since the last ice age.)

I took this shot two days ago on approach to San Francisco on a flight from Boston. Here’s a set of all the photos I’ve taken of salt ponds, both here and in the desert. And here is the whole set of shots I took from coast to coast. Most were at the ends of the flight, since the sky was undercast most of the way.

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