In-Flight Images

A week or so from when this posts, Ann and I will be in Portugal.  What better way to celebrate that than to do a post of images taken with my iPhone during our flight back from Portugal in January?  Well, there’s probably a lot of better ways to celebrate, but this will have to do.  My apologies for the quality of the images.  Believe me, they do not do the experience of them justice.  I could blame the fact that my monitor is not calibrated, there’s been an update to Capture One, that I haven’t used Capture One or done anything really photography-related in 3 months, or the fact that I’m a crappy photographer.  Set all that aside; the reality is that these images are a reminder to always pay visual attention to the world around you.  Oftentimes you’ll be glad you did.

This is an image-intensive post, so just enjoy them.  I’ll try to chat a bit along the way to keep things interesting on the word front, but I had a hard time culling the images too much.  I did very little adjusting of the image character and even less of editing which images to select.  It was best just to get them out for others to enjoy.

Those of you who have been following me for awhile know that I enjoy looking out the window, and occasionally photographing, while I’m flying.  I’ll never get to be onboard the International Space Station, so this is the closest I’ll get to a birds-eye view (or astronaut’s view) of the earth.  Whether it’s the awe I felt looking across the endless Sahara Desert on a flight back to Liberia, or seeing the Matterhorn through the window on our flight to Munich in Germany, I always love examining the geography of Earth.  That’s in part why I love photographing the landscape.

This trip offered something special and very, very unexpected.

Not only did it tap into the incredible clouds and colors that Ann and I are drawn to (the reason we wake up at ungodly hours of the morning), it did so in a way that was one loooooonnnnnnggggggg, slowly but constantly changing mind blowing experience.

You see, these images were taken over a 4 hour period, from 4 - 8 pm (Portugal time).  A period where Ann and I fell asleep a couple of times (we’d been up since 2am that morning to catch our flight).  And it seemed every time one of us woke up, there was something new to see.

It didn’t take me long to realize what was happening, though I checked into the in-flight route tracker on the entertainment center to make sure.  Our return flight took us up to the arctic circle, passing through Iceland and Greenland before heading back down into Canada and then the US, ultimately to arrive in Denver.

We were chasing the sun, and as we passed north of the arctic circle it never quite looked like night, it wasn’t daylight either.  And as we turned southward slightly, it became morning again (we arrived in Denver at 3pm local time by my recollection).

What wound up happening was that, by chasing the sun, we were able to have that incredible pre-dawn light, which usually lasts, at best, half an hour, for several hours.

Inevitably, we started catching up to daytime, but that just gave us even more colors and textures on the icy landscape below.

The term “awe” just doesn’t seem to do it justice. 

And as we hit shorelines, the contrast between land and water (actually, land and ice) really struck home the vastness of what we were observing below. 

I have to admit, the ability to switch to a physical telephoto lens on my new iPhone was a blessing.

I can only hope that you, everyone in fact, will be able to have moments like this.

Ann and I would photograph in bursts, then sit back and just watch the beauty pass by . . .

And then begin another burst of images.

Yeah, this flight surpassed even the flight over the Sahara. 

And then, just like our pre-dawn photo shoots during our trips, morning arrived all too quickly.  The brilliant colors eased off in an instant, leaving remnants of color for a few more moments, only to disappear leaving a cracked, white ice flow below and a white vastness in the distance.

The sun finally topped the horizon again and lit the landscape a brilliant white.  Beautiful in its own way, but something more for the eye than the camera.  At least from 30,000+ feet.  

We’ll be leaving for Portugal on Sunday June 7th.  Eugene - San Francisco - Frankfurt - Porto.  Who know when I’ll be posting again, but I hope it will be not too long this time.  The heavy work of making the move happen has passed.  Now it’s time to bring back some of what gives me so much joy in life, and to share that with others.  Until then, for all of us who need to continue hunkering down a bit, think about your next trips.  And along the way, don’t forget the journey, that’s often the most rewarding part.