StarDestroyer.Net BBS

A thread for your photos taken from the air.

Some photos from a scenic flight I took near New Plymouth in New Zealand

Black sand beaches

The White Cliffs, named after the ones in Dover



Amazing water color

Wow, thats some nice shots. Got a full size of the last one?

Pfft, those are Grey Cliffs! Be original! break away from our naming schemes!

But those really are very nice shots

Excellent!

Mine are mostly farm fields - I'll add some later, as I'm still having some computer problems here.

I especially like the last one.

Ace Pace wrote:Wow, thats some nice shots. Got a full size of the last one?

You can find a full size here

Mine are mostly farm fields - I'll add some later, as I'm still having some computer problems here.

I especially like the last one.

Douglass Adams had it right when he said New Zealand has scenery that makes you want to spontaneously burst into applause.

A few more, mostly this time from after a bike trip in the Marlborough Sounds

Waikawa






A view of part of the track we biked.




Coming in for a landing


Most definitely not in the Marlborough Sounds. Any guesses where?

Spin Echo wrote: Most definitely not in the Marlborough Sounds. Any guesses where?
-img-

Is that the harbour bridge down at the bottom of that picture?

Edit: NM, That's the ANZAC bridge isn't it? It's Sydney.

Spyder wrote:

Spin Echo wrote: Most definitely not in the Marlborough Sounds. Any guesses where?
-img-

Is that the harbour bridge down at the bottom of that picture?

Edit: NM, That's the ANZAC bridge isn't it? It's Sydney.

I though it would have been the Opera House that gave it away.

Can I get a full size of this because these are really nice shots.

Spin Echo wrote:

Spyder wrote:

Spin Echo wrote: Most definitely not in the Marlborough Sounds. Any guesses where?
-img-

Is that the harbour bridge down at the bottom of that picture?

Edit: NM, That's the ANZAC bridge isn't it? It's Sydney.

I though it would have been the Opera House that gave it away.

Yeah, it was. But until I noticed it I was thinking it was a shot of Auckland facing south from above the north shore. I was trying to work out why I couldn't see the sky tower or most of the motorway.

...and why it didn't actually look that much like Auckland.

Spin Echo's pictures had me going back through my collection to see what I could share. And I noted a few things:

1) The American Midwest is known for many things, but it is not known for its dramatic landscapes. I am almost embarassed to show these after all the dramatic natural landscapes of New Zealand.

2) I take lots of pictures of aiplanes, but surprisingly few of them from airplanes while in flight.

3) I live in a very flat place.

4) There is a fuck of a lot of farming going on around here.

So, here's a whirlwind tour of three US states:

This is Indiana, very shortly after departure from Knox County airport from my friend's Mooney. The scenery is very flat.


This is Illinois, take from a Stearman biplane. Remarkably, it is even more flat than Indiana.


I am trying to view these with eyes unaccustomed to seeing this landscape. These are, I might mention, the Great Plains. There aren't a whole lot of trees to be seen. As a bit of trivia - as percentage of landscape cover, we actually have twice as many trees now as when the Europeans first arrived. That's why so many of the tree lines follow such straight lines - they were planted and tended by people, not nature. These were part of the great grasslands of North America, and now they're the great farmlands.


These next two are from Wisconsin, which is the bumpiest/hilliest place around here. It's still very flat, at least in this portion, which is between Chicago and Milwaukee. I can see the hills and humps in this photo, but my eyes are used to deciphering this scenery and I don't know if it's apparent to anyone else. Note we have many more trees - this is actually just north of the Great Plains proper, and the area has both more lakes and more precipitation during the year, so the natural groundcover has always been more forested. Aircraft is a Hughes 300 helicopter, and to be honest these are actually from my husband's collection.



The second one of these, with the interesting plowing configurations, is more illustrative of what "aerial photography" is around here. We tend not to get the sweeping landscapes - none of which are terribly interesting and all of which look much the same for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers - but rather zoom in on the more interesting details, like creative plowing.

The big navigational challege around here is not getting lost in this flat landscape. While there are features, one farm looks much the same as another. If you don't have something major in view, like Lake Michigan, the Mississippi River, or a forest of skyscrapers like Chicago you can get very, very lost.

On the up side - there are LOTS of emergency landing spots.

You might also notice we don't fly very high around here. Well, the scenery gets even flatter and less detailed the higher up you are, so it's not like that's going to improve anything. At 10,000 feet in this area (um... around 3,000 meters) the view is just as flat despite the horizon being even further in the distance. There are no mountains, no rolling hills, no interesting bumps at all for as far as the airborne eye can see. You are flying above a flat circle under the biggest sky you've ever seen, like a big blue bowl overturned over a (depending on the season) green or brown or white flat plate.

Spin Echo:



Are those pics taken from some sort of plane-mounted camera?

Shinova wrote:Spin Echo:



Are those pics taken from some sort of plane-mounted camera?

Nope, just from the passenger seat. In some of the poorer quality ones I didn't bother posting, you can see reflection from the glass of the windows.