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

Have you Backed Up Your Photos?

Many of the photographs that you take are non-replaceable. Whether they are snapshots of family, birthday, anniversary, reunion or other events, most likely they are important possessions that you do not want to lose.

In the days before digital photography, many of us stuffed negatives, slides and snapshots in the proverbial shoebox for safekeeping. But with the advent of digital cameras photography became easier and less expensive resulting in a steep increase of the number of pictures and videos that we took. And of the number has literally exploded with the addition of our always handy cellphone camera.

The question is – are we taking the steps to backup and/or organize all of our photos and videos? Nowadays there are a myriad ways to store images. The one you choose is based on the amount of effort you have to expend to backup and organize your stash and the cost for storing them.

Here’s a few of the ways that I backup and organize my photos and videos. From here on in when I refer to images this is to be both photographs and videos.

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Cellphones fall into either the Apple iOS category or the Android category. And since your cellphone doubles as cameras, it’s a good idea to backup the images regularly.

While I’m insistent on safeguarding the images on my cellphone, I’m also interested in doing so as easily and inexpensively as possible. So I’ve chosen several ways to do this that are simple and automated.

My cell is an iPhone so I don’t have a lot of experience with Android models. Android owners can use both the Google and Amazon services for backup up their images.

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Apple Photos app

My iPhone can automatically upload all of my photos to the Apple cloud for safekeeping.

1. Go to the Settings menu:
2. Beneath your name choose Apple ID, iCloud+, Media & Purchases.
3. Choose iCloud
4. Choose Photos
5. Next to Sync this iPhone turn the button on

Apple iCloud users are entitled to 5GB of storage with their account. This amount of storage is enough for about 2500 photos of average size. For larger photo collections, you can purchase 50GB additional storage for $.99 (99 cents) a month. I have 8,000 photos and 1,300 videos in my current collection. If you have a huge collection you can purchase 2TB of storage for $9.99 a month.

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Google Photos app

I also have Google Photos app installed on my iPhone. Google Photos copies the photos on my iPhone to my Google Library in the cloud. I purchased 100 GB of storage which cost $1.99 per month. Currently I have more than 30,000 images but using only 36 GB of the allocated storage. There are other options to purchase additional storage on the Google cloud. For Android users the Google Photos app has an option to backup the photos on your cell phone to your Google Library in the cloud.

Google Photos has features to edit, add descriptions and comments, identify faces, organize images into albums and share images.

Google Photos users are entitled to 15GB of storage with their account. This amount of storage is enough for about 7500 photos of average size. For larger photo collections, you can purchase 100GB additional storage for $1.99 a month.

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Amazon Photos app

The Amazon Photos app is also installed on my iPhone. Amazon Prime members receive unlimited free storage for photos and 5 GB for videos. You can use either their iOS (iPhone/iPad) or Android app to automatically backup your images. Non-Prime members can purchase 100 GB of storage on the Amazon cloud for $19.99 per year ($1.66/month). Currently, I have about 9,000 photos and 2000 videos stored on the Amazon’s cloud using 82 GB of storage.

Amazon Photos has features to edit, apply filters, add text and organize images into albums or groups and share images.

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As you can see, I have safeguarded my cellphone photos in three different places. Maybe it’s “overkill” to have three different backups but the process is automatic. Since I have more images than the allotted free space for the various services I don’t mind the few dollars a month since it saves me the worry that I might otherwise loose an important event.

It’s easy and either free or inexpensive so please don’t forget to protect your photos and videos.

Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

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Not Quite Magic, But Amazing Nonetheless

 
Like many photography buffs, I subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud that provides me a set of applications for editing my images. For all of the years that I’ve been using the computer for photography, I’ve never been a regular user of Photoshop. While I’ve used it on occasion I’ve instead relied on the company’s younger offspring Lightroom for most of my image editing.

As a subscriber I receive regular electronically delivered newsletters about Creative Cloud. A few weeks ago one of the articles drew my interest – colorizing black and white images.

Those of us who grew up taking pictures in the 1950s and 1960s have a large stash of black and white photos – and I have my share. I clicked on the article to find out more about this magical process.

The process involved using one of Photoshop’s built-in filters. Being a Photoshop novice I was unfamiliar with these filters so I had to dig deeper.

Well it turns out that I didn’t have to dig very much. The newsletter explained that the only thing I needed to do was to choose “Neural Filter” from Photoshop’s top menu and then click the “Colorize” button. Instantly – yes instantly – the black and white photo was converted to a color version.

The images are colorized using a best guess model that Adobe employs. The processing is not perfect but most of the images that I tried turned out acceptable. The few inconsistencies that I noticed did not detract from the overall results. And a few of the colorized images exceeded my expectations.

Below are a few of the B&W’s – including some of my favorites – that I was anxious to try.
 

Click on any image to see more detail.
A photo of my Grandmother and two uncles taken in the 1950s.	The colorized version fails to maintain consistent color of the suits.
A high school photo of a student from the 1960s.	The colorized version is good except the student didn’t use lipstick.
Writer William F Buckley lecturing at the Univ of Michigan in 1969.	Above you will notice that the background does not maintain the same color.
Hockey star Tim Horton sitting in the penalty box at Madison Square Garden about 1964.	The color processing chose blue for Tim’s jersey which happens to be the color of the Toronto Maple Leaf uniform. Good guess.
Singer Ron Townsend of the Fifth Dimension performing in Ann Arbor in 1970	An amazing transformation. I don’t know if the colors are accurate to his 1970’s outfit but they appear authentic.
A snapshot of my wife while we were enjoying nature and the outdoors in 1969.	Photoshop’s choice of colors is less important to me than the warm feeling that I receive from the colorized photo.

 
 
I’m still excited when I find another older black & white photo that I can colorize.

 
 
Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

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