Great photos are born in the camera

By now you know that Stay Focused is part the arnielee website. We’re here because we love taking pictures. You’ll find articles based on our 60+ years of experience in photography. We’re happy to share our know-how with you so in hopes that you’ll discover new ways to enjoy your picture taking even more. We recently opened our Gallery Store for those interested in browsing our collection of fine art photographs.

Enjoying Mother Nature’s Gifts

Tomorrow is Earth Day.

The first Earth Day took place in 1970 when I was a young student. I recall the many loud calls to conserve and protect our natural resources. The task ahead was to improve the way the worldwide economy functions so as to reduce and/or prevent harm to our environment. The goal was to keep our planet viable into the future.

The general consensus is that we have a long way to go to change the trajectory of our collective and personal behavior to reach the goal. I’m not here to judge or criticize. Instead I’ll continue to minimize my carbon footprint and encourage those that I can influence to do the same.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of my free time roaming the outdoors USA visiting so many wonderful places that Mother Nature has provided. From this small gallery of photos I’ve collected along the way you can tell that I’m a admirer and lover of our planet.

Over the years I’ve written other Earth Day articles. Here’s one from two years ago on my other site.

Happy Earth Day.

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South Dakota Air & Space Museum

After visiting Mt Rushmore National Park last summer, we took a short drive to Ellsworth AFB in nearby Box Elder, SD. For those who are aviation enthusiast Ellsworth is known as the home to the B-1 Lancer stealth bombers.

I was anxious to see on up close and enjoyed viewing other aircraft on exhibit at the museum.

Here are a few of the aircraft on display.

 

Step by Step Photo Detective

My wife often thinks of me as a nerd and she’s correct for the most part.

I tend to take a windows seat when flying. While others are napping during the flight I’m viewing the scenery below.

Every once in a while I’ll spot a familiar pattern on the ground so I’ll pull my small camera from my pocket and take a picture. The pattern below is an airport with the straight line runway(s). I’ve repeated this action many times over the years that I’ve flown.

Of course it isn’t always easy to determine the name of the airport in the photograph. But I’ve pieced together a way to help me identify the airport.

If you too are a little “nerdy” and know a little about longitude and latitude, please follow along as I explain the technique that I use.

The other steps that I used to identify the airport were made after I returned home. The first task was to edit the photograph to make it clearer.

My next step was to go to the website flightaware.com. This website has a multitude of aircraft information including the statistics of our UAL 2637 flight. As you’ll see, we will first find our flight for February 6th and then examine the details.

Flightaware records the aircraft’s position every 30 seconds in the Track Log. We scroll through the Track Log to the approximate time that matches the photo’s timestamp we can see that the aircraft was at 41.8177 latitude and -91.1543 latitude at about 1:23pm.

The next step is to use Google Maps to find the aircraft’s location on the map for this latitude and longitude.

The website vfrchart.com has the aircraft charts for the United States (and more). In the upper left corner of the site I have typed tipton, ia and chosen Sectionals from the drop down selections to display a portion of the sectional chart. Tipton is in the center with other airports in the vicinity of Tipton. An airport is surrounded by a dark rust color circle.

The hard work is to determine which of the airports is the one in the photo. Knowing that the aircraft is flying mostly eastward and the photo is north of our track (looking out of the left window of the aircraft), the possible airports are north of Tipton. In our case the one airport directly north of Tipton is the Monticello airport.

To make sure, I used Google Maps to display the Monticello Airport.

So these are the steps that I use to identify airports that I photograph from the air.

Again I’ll say that this is a nerdy exercise, but taking photos out of the aircraft’s window is preferable to napping.

By the way, I have a collection of airports that I’ve taken from above. You can see these airports at my other website here https://arnielee.com/wordpress/?p=6049.

Written by:

Arnie Lee

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