Dropping in to O’Hare you get to overfly lots of neighborhoods. The lower you get, the more you see each individual house. I find myself wondering about each of the house and who lives there. Since they clearly have a lot of planes flying over them every day, do they get annoyed by my passage or are they oblivious to each passing jet given the frequency with which they appear?
I was staring idly out of the window as I was flying across California when a shape on the ground below caught my eye. I grabbed the camera as I realized we were coming across Yosemite. From above, the most conspicuous shape is that of Half Dome. However, it looks very different when looking down on it than it does when you are on a level with it. It almost seems distorted. I grabbed a few shots as we zipped overhead and then it disappeared behind the wing.
Another trip and another flight out of SeaTac. I was sitting on the left side of the plane without having given any thought to what I might see en route. As it happened, we departed to the south and then, after a short time in the climb, we turned on course for our destination. It just so happened that our turn brought us around the south side of Mount Rainier. I was sitting on the side that happened to have a great view of the mountain as we turned.
I was sitting down the back of the plane so, for a while, the wing was in the shot. I wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed by this or to have something to give some perspective to what I was shooting. Aerial photos of large landscapes usually lack a sense of scale and I doubt the wing altered that, but it was worth a try. The cloud banks that lay on the surrounding foothills are probably rather large, but they seem almost insignificant against the scale of the mountain. A lucky day to be heading the right way, sitting on the right side of the plane, turning where we did and then not having the whole thing shrouded in cloud!
Dallas is a place that has a lot of highways. Big highways and smaller ones but lots of them. The interchanges take up a lot of space but I guess in Texas you have a lot of space. The patterns of an interchange are best appreciated from the air. In this case it was the window of an Alaska jet heading in to Love Field so not the ideal platform but it did quite a good job all the same.
A trip away included a late arrival back into Seattle. I hadn’t thought about which approach we might make to SeaTac so my seat selection was accidental, but I ended up on the side of the plane that was overlooking downtown Seattle as we made our final approach. Having the M6 provided me with a bit more flexibility on shooting than would be the case with the phone and something far more maneuverable than if I was using one of the SLRs. It handled the low light levels surprisingly well.
I also think the smaller lens elements of the EF-M are better able to handle the distortion of windows. The distorted bits could cover more of the field of view of course but you have more of a chance of getting between the worst bits. With the big lenses, it is almost impossible to get a good clear patch for the whole lens when you zoom in to check the details.
When Boeing developed its updates to the base versions of the 777, it came up with the higher capacity long range 300ER and a lower capacity but ultra long range version, the 200LR. The 300ER sold very well but the 200LR was more of a niche product and, while it sold, it never went in the same numbers as its larger sibling. Etihad was one of the customers but they have now decided they have no further use for the type and it is being retired. I was glad to catch one at LAX in the days running up to their retirement.
I-90 crosses Lake Washington on a floating bridge. I have driven over it countless times. It crosses from Seattle to Mercer Island which the freeway then crosses before continuing on to the east side. I was on that side of the plane when taking off from SeaTac and got a great view of the bridge. The dead straight floating section and the transition to land looked very interesting from above. The road actually goes through a tunnel on Mercer Island in a long curve which, when I imagined its path, only added to the geometry of the whole.
I have been on a couple of flights recently that took my past Mt St Helens. One was coming back home from LA and the other was departing out towards Dallas. In both cases I got a good view of the mountain covered in snow and with hints of clouds lower down. When you live in Seattle, Mt Rainier is a constant reminder of the volcanoes that surround you but Mt St Helens is the one that has reminded everyone about the power that these mountains contain. Hopefully it will be calm for a while.
I have heard about the Cotton Bowl a lot over the years. There are so many Bowl games these days that I kind of forgot that some of them are actually the names of stadiums. I didn’t even know where it was. Turns out it is Dallas and it is right by the approach to Love Field. I happened to have the camera in hand as we came down final approach and got a few shots of the stadium and the surrounding facilities. It looked a bit quieter on this day than is sometimes the case.
An Aeroflot Airbus A330 landed at LAX while I was shooting there. On plenty of occasions, I have seen ice on the underside of the wings of landing aircraft where the cold fuel remaining in the tanks has caused condensation and freezing in the warmer damp air lower down. However, I haven’t ever noticed it on the fuselage structure. On this jet, though, I could see ice on the surface and the patterns of ice reflected the underlying fuselage structure. Maybe this is there more often and it was just the paint finish that made it show up this time.
