Tag: photography

The View From 35,000 Feet

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I’m a little late with this post because I just returned from a visit to friends and family in San Francisco. I like a window seat when I fly, and no matter how much reading material I bring, I mostly look out the window. I like to watch the maze of taxiways resolve into a map of the airport, and when it disappears in clouds I hear Joni Mitchell in my head: angel hair, ice cream castles, feather canyons, she said. She didn’t mention this one, a teddy bear, or maybe my cat waiting for me at home. 

Then we’re above the clouds looking down. I watch for mountains carrying snow maps of their canyons and ridges, as natural as the crinkly lines of rivers, or the clouds and their shadows. But what about the big smooth snowfields – treeless due to landslides, or landscaped into ski resorts? The hand of nature or the hand of man? 

There’s no question about it when we come to the green circles of irrigated farms. The first time I saw these they made me laugh – could anything be more incongruous with natural landscapes? It’s blatantly obvious that they’re not natural, but why is that? Nature pulls off perfect form with flowers, and likely with some of the plants being grown in those circles. These are on a grid and straight lines are another tip-off of human activity, but I’ve seen circles randomly placed and they looked just as unnatural as these.

Earth, we’re told, is not a perfect sphere, but a lumpy one. From cruising altitude you can just see the curve in the earth’s horizon, a small version of those photos of earth from the moon. For me it packs the same message: we all live here; we’re all in this together. We share the sky, too. On cross country flights it’s not unusual to pass a plane going the other way, whose progress in the opposite direction gives the illusion that it’s zipping along much faster than we are. Then I think of a woman in that plane looking out her window and seeing our plane zipping past hers. Maybe she’s taking a photo of us.

Some four and a half hours after we lifted into the sky, we came back down again. One last view of Detroit area street grids, and the big picture so clear from our high perspective fragmented back into the tangle of details we live in. I’ll be knee deep in them tomorrow, but right now I’m going to fix a cup of tea, sit here, and think about the sky.

Song and Rain

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The tulips at my windowsill are done now and the amaryllis have come into glory, turning their backs to me because the sun is so much more compelling. Birds that were here all winter but mostly hiding in the shrubbery, are now flaunting themselves in song – certainly song from the cardinals and robins. I’m not sure I’d call it that from the bluejays. Still, it serves their purpose, claiming a territory, finding a mate, the tasks of approaching spring. 

The snow has turned to rain, sometimes as it falls. The ice is gone from our small neighborhood creek, where bare branches and flattened grass give us a longer view than usual of the path it provides for deer on their way to the river. That’s one of my favorite things about winter – how it changes the way we see things.

There’s a song about changing viewpoints, starting with clouds, that I always think of when I’m on an airplane. I like to sit in the window seat and watch the familiar, detailed ground turn into vast maps, and clouds become veils and carpets. I take photos and make sketches but nothing’s gelled into a painting yet. 

The sky is a rich source of painterly inspiration from below as well as above. Walking up my street yesterday I saw this. How would I paint clouds so they came out like that? Painted ultra-realistically, wouldn’t they look fake? These particular trees are evergreens so the view is seasonless, but if I painted in bare branches, or hung them with snow, or flowers, or red leaves, the same sky would tell a different story every time.

This is one of my favorite early-spring photos, taken a few years ago. I love how the tree seems to grow out of the barn, entirely because of where I stood to take the picture. The trees are bare; the sky looks like it might want to snow but will have to settle for rain. Once the tree leafs out, the barn, from this angle, will disappear. With all the development happening in our area, it may already be gone.