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| Tuesday, March 1, 2005 |
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Path test 
| | Sorry I've been late helping ya'll solve the mystery of this the picture I put up here the other day. My clue was, Those of you familiar with this particular kind of farming will know what this scene shows. The trick is to identify exactly where this farm is. |
| | Well, what's being farmed here, in addition to the grass (rye wheat, I assume), is wind. The shot is of a wind farm. |
| | I won't tell you where it is, exactly, yet. What I will tell you is that I shot it en route from San Francisco to London on 11 July 2004, at 9:15:41am. I shot the picture above at 9:18:08am. It would be cool, math-wise, if I had the departure and arrival times, but I don't have those. Still, the location shouldn't be too hard to figure out, assuming the plane is traveling at (I would guess) about 500 miles per hour. So, if you correctly guess where I shot the picture above, you can back-vector your way toward SFO and find the general location of the wind farm. |
| | I love the way digital photography involves all this useful EXIF data, in addition to the pictures themselves. In addition to the date and time, it tells me I shot the picture at f5.9 at 1/314 sec with an ISO Speed (ASA) of 100, in program exposure mode with the flash turned off, using patterned metering and no exposure bias. |
| | So I've got a few thousand more shots like these, all taken from the vantage commercial aircraft windows. And I'm thinking it would be fun to make them into a book, with digressions into geography, geology, weather, aviation, climate, culture... whatever I (or we) can dilate upon at greater width from 39,000 feet than down here on the ground. |
| | I also think the world needs a book that gives proper PR to the privileged perspective that flying provides to passengers lucky (or smart) enough to have a view. I realize that the Correct Thing for jaded flyers to do is take the aisle seats and sleep or work on laptops. And that many like window seats so they can close the shade and sleep leaning against the wall, instead of another passenger. But I know there are some of us — perhaps enough to make a market — who are thrilled by the view, and would like to know more about what-all is down there. |
| | Every time I fly over The West, for example, I see more of what geologists call "the picture": the four-dimensional story of the past half billion years, exposed by eroding rock. It would be fun to share some of that, and to invite others to join in with pictures and stories of their own. |
| | When I've talked about doing this before, I've been told it has already been done, by Gregory Dicum in Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air. I just got the book, and it's good. But most of the photographs are from space, not from passenger seats, and the subjects are general and regional. I think there's still an opening here for personal and specific stuff. One easily filled by a few interested bloggers with cameras. |
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