Aerial photographs

...

A window seat on an early morning flight. A minute or two after take-off at about 1 or 2 thousand meters, and there’s the harbor, blue and beautiful, below. A scene you like you never see from the ground. You fumble for the camera, set 400/sec to control for shake, and snap.

Got it? You wish. The shot is a flat, pale, washed-out approximation of what you thought you saw.

Shooting through the perspex window is like shooting through a gauze mask.

In-camera adjustments and tweaking brightness, contrast, hue and intensity in Photoshop later can partly resurrect even a totally washed-out shot.

But you are left with the existential question: “Why did I take this picture?”

Maybe the scene looked beautiful and you wanted to be reminded of it again later. Maybe you wanted to show someone to talk about your trip.

An aerial photograph is a kind of map. And a photograph’s meaningfulness can be extended by laying it alongside a cartographic representation.

The Google mappers have taken this in an interesting direction.

...