The Aerial Horizon
Forget where your feet are and simply enjoy the view.
Rising
Dark vaporous mountains rising toward the tropopause, the edges of their smooth flowing faces shimmer beneath a sunlight veil of morning light. Out of sight, beneath the mass of benign looking cloud tops, thunderstorms sweep across the eastern Texas landscape.
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Rounding the Escalante
Rounding the Escalante, we watch the clouds recede from the desert like an ancient sea, revealing the Capitol Reef…A textural boundary between the sand frosted desert to the east and the rippling steps of the Grand Staircase to the west.
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Without Names
So deep in the back country that the map shows no trails or roads and the landmarks have no names, it is here in the Navajo back country that the setting sun grants us a new experience of light, color, and texture so enchanting that we yearn to know more…but this moment in this unnamed place is a solitary soulful glimpse through one of the thin places where we come to know meaning without definition…hairs stand on end and we are filled with a warm indefinable sense of satisfaction.
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Foment Between the Layers
Darkness beneath, sunshine above…the foment of roiling, churning energy trapped between layers sends a rumble beneath our wings as we penetrate the weather in search of the night.
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Purple and Gold: Abstract New Orleans
Working our way up the Mississippi through New Orleans, a city of purple and gold at its core…imagining the saturated view brings a certain serenity to our view of the lively city below. A true image, color saturated and polarized.
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A Vision of Echoes
If we could visualize the sound of the slow forceful movement of earth, it would be manifest in a slow rolling wave across a still desert. Each spike in amplitude reflected in the rise of a monocline, casting deep shadows onto the silent desert beneath…each curve a rocky echo of the earth’s roaring motion. The Echo Cliffs in northern Arizona roll southward away from Marble Gorge granting us this vision of sound and motion.
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Borderlands – A Topoglyphic Abstract
Along the borderlands between Texas and New Mexico, the jagged line of the escarpment’s face creates a natural borderline as we cross from the tamed grasslands of West Texas into the rambling grasslands of eastern New Mexico.
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Imagining Detail
Following the course of the Colorado River as it winds through the Grand Canyon, we are amazed by the colors, textures, and seemingly miraculous though utterly logical patterns created by water over an evolving landscape…and we are reminded, as we look upon Natural Arch, that some details must be imagined…for all the perspective that our lofty observation point yields, it is a meager substitute for the awesome sensation of touching the earth and being dwarfed by the magnitude of its creation.
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No Man’s Dawn
As dawn creeps across the eastern edges of Monument Valley, the form of No Man’s Mesa begins to emerge from the shadows as if a vision materializing from the mist of dreams.
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Glory Over Turbulent Skies
Weather churning beneath our flightpath…We are suspended between the layers with the sun on out tail and our shadow casts a Brocken Spectre of reflected and scattered light on the canvas of clouds ahead of us…The “glory of the pilot.” A true image, polarized.
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Shadowing Oljeto
Following the curves of Oljeto Mesa as we work our way through the profusion of visual stimuli toward Monument Valley, shadows of lingering clouds dot the mesa and valley floor beneath adding a temporary pattern to the ancient layers of earth.
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Observation Points
In a moment of meteorological clarity we catch a glimpse of Muley Point through a hole in the clouds…The illuminated view of this observation point (from our private observation point) gives us a sense that we are enjoying the view from above of people who are enjoying the view from below.
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The Color of Earth
Like so many stereotypes of the colors of things, we think of earth as colored in various hues of brown…but then we come to Blue Point, a cliff in the south of the Hopi Nation and our perspective on the color of earth changes. The paradox is that we look on this as an abstraction of reality, but our reality has actually been abstracted by our preconceptions…earth is not bound by the limits of Crayola’s big 64 color box.
Basking in the Evening Light
The rocky faces of Yosemite’s mountains bask in the evening sunlight, casting shadows eastward into the night. Happy 125th Anniversary, Yosemite.
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Abstract Environs
The sun illuminates the atmosphere around us in a soft pink radiant glow as it dips below the cloud deck and lights it from beneath…this colorful yet dimensionless cloudscape meets the earth on the Carrizo Plain where, in the vast expanse of grasslands, the abstract saline image of Soda Lake emerges reflecting the hue of the sunlit clouds above.
A Heavenly Duel
The stiff line of red light radiating from the aerial horizon above the Pacific Ocean sent a wave of excitement and anticipation rippling across the coastal mountaintops as if some great event were transpiring out beyond…But it was a jealous sight, a heavenly duel, as the sun attempted to draw our attention away from the moon on its big night…Layers of clouds prevented us from seeing the lunar eclipse evolve, until in our descent, we caught a glimpse of the last sliver of illuminated moon before its total eclipse.
issed
Nebulous
In the moment that we realize that everything is inseparable, we stop thinking of heaven and earth as two separate realms, and we begin to understand that we are all part of one essence, each element leaving its mark on the other. The heavens leave their marks on the earth through water and shadow, while the earth sheds dust into the air to color the heavens…we see all of this in reflected light as a nebulous whole…and here is harmony.
Sweeping Toward Memphis
Contrails sweep below as we cross paths with memories of others who recently passed this way and drifted into the sunset over Memphis.
Back of the Mountain – Abstract
In the moments after sunrise, light begins to find its way to the back side of the mountain ranges while the slopes remain in shadow. The colors in this photograph have been saturated to bring out the orange hue of the sky and the purple of the shadows, making this seem a little more than reality…In this view, one can barely see the lines of light streaming through particles suspended in the atmosphere behind the mountains, possibly the most dramatic element of the scene. In the real moment, those lines create the image that sticks with me…the color is just emotion.
Signs
Outside our windows we don’t have any signs…posted limits are either red lines on our gauges or numbers in our heads…Similarly, the aerial horizon is clear and consistent (albeit ambiguous), a hazy line that separates earth and space…But, below the horizon, we frequently see signs that we we may recognize, if we stop for a moment to interpret them. Flying through the Cascades in Washington, we look down upon South Twin and see its snow-covered face set incongruously among green mountains and hilltops…we see signs of a season about to change. Welcome autumn, winter is coming.
The Aerial Horizon – Photography
The Aerial Horizon 