Western Landforms

Okay, okay, it's just some snapshots out the airplane window on the way home. Northwest flight 440, SJC to MSP. I think these pictures extend all the way into South Dakota, but maybe a state short of that.

One of the few clearcut losses of digital photography is that my camera is an electronic gadget that I can't use until they tell me to (generally at about 10,000 feet). But this last trip we took a slightly unusual routing out of San Jose, up the Peninsula and turning right just about by San Francisco. And they told me I could use toys just before the turn, and even though I hadn't thought about it in advance, I moved fast enough to get the camera out while the Bay Bridge was still in sight.

I'm not nearly so clear on where the later pictures are. Past Nevada I'm pretty sure. I snapped things that looked interesting or typical when I happened to glance out the window, while working on some Perl code on the laptop.

The window itself is sometimes a bit of a challenge, but mine was clean and unscratched. Still, it was several more layers of non-optical-grade stuff in the light path. Then, after that, there were a few miles of air, usually at least somewhat hazy. As a result the original pictures are lacking in contrast and have a very pronouced blue cast, which increases as the distance increases. So one of the reasons I'm bothering to post these is for the photoshop practice. The colors are generally pretty wonky, I suspect -- but I don't know, because I was seeing the ground through that same haze, I never did see the original colors at ground level. Still, the choices I made in editing have less practical basis than in most pictures I take.

For those who are interested, I did roughly this to each picture: First, I stretched each color channel to fill the whole range (conveniently, clicking the "auto" button in the curves tool does this; it's rarely useful except for weird situations like this). Then I made another curves adjustment layer to bring the far-away tones to about the same contrast and color balance as the foreground, and put in a layer mask of a gradient running from white at the most distant spot, to black at the closest. Then I fudged contrast (curve shape) and color balance in both of them until I kinda liked the final result.