The Aerial Horizon
Forget where your feet are and simply enjoy the view.
On Photo Challenges and Inspiration
Let me start by saying that I see photo challenges in the blog stream everyday and everyday artists post some really wonderful images, but these challenges are a mystery to me…”Who is doing the challenging and what is the outcome?”… “What is the goal?”… “Where can I see the work of the other competitors?”… “Who won?”… As I reflect on my own questions, I realize that my upbringing as a Naval Aviator embedded in me a sense that there is always a winner and a loser and that everything (Everything) is a competition…now, I throttle back and think about my own motivations…Everything does not need to be a competition (I’ve grown up a little). Competition is the means by which we motivate ourselves to perform or produce. Competition is what we require in the absence of inspiration… What a thought?! Imagine a world in which we are all inspired and act upon inspiration instead of competition. This is where I find myself…I mean this is where I truly find myself…In my photography, I am searching for inspiration and when I find it, the landscape screams to me, “Capture this moment! Share this moment!” These are the moments that excite, engage and inspire me…they call me. These are the moments that I try to share on the Aerial Horizon. The scene in this photograph inspired me to capture it, as I passed over the Kanab Plateau and looked southeastward upon the Grand Canyon pondering the snow-covered desert landscape. What inspires you? Whatever it is, follow it and find yourself…And when you need the nudge of competition, take on the photo challenges until you discover your inspiration.
Fog Rolls Through
Snow fell across the American Southwest last week, leaving the high desert terrain under a blanket of white striped with bands of umber, orange, and vermillion…each mesa and butte displacing layers of snow high above the desert floor and each canyon falling away to reveal spectacular singular instances of colored vertical rock faces framed by the snow covered horizontal planes…Near Page, Arizona, fog rolls through the Paria Canyon.
A Dream Escapes
Slowly slipping into the heavens, a year end dream escapes the deep blue night and is illuminated by the light of a new day…a new year…a hopeful sign above the aerial horizon as we hopelessly chase the night that lingers in our memory and in our sight while the realities of daylight and the future consume us.
Appalachian Hues
The purple shadows of the Appalachian Mountains rest quietly beneath a drape of orange and blue clouds, dyed by the resigning sun as twilight overcomes the range…Tomorrow, we embark on a new year and we open our eyes to new discoveries with hopeful aspirations and new perspectives on the world that surrounds us.
Canyon Under Cover
Clouds roll across the Arizona desert, clinging to the features of the Grand Canyon as if the weather originated in its depths. As the Canyon is slowly revealed from under this cover, we begin to orient ourselves and draw the hidden parts of the canyon with our minds eyes.
2014 in review
Thanks for a great year. In 2015, I hope you will continue to follow, like, share, and comment on the images that you find here. Happy New Year!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,100 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Mountain Flowers
Crossing the front range over the mountains of New Mexico, we take a look at the landscape from a new perspective…Where snow topped peaks once seemed to dominate the view, our new perspective yields the apparent concave faces of flowers in the landscape. Turning our world upside down reveals a new and different understanding of our environment…what was convex is concave…peaks become sculpted valleys. The pinnacle of our understanding of our environment is reached when we understand that we cannot comprehend it all…then we see the true beauty and mystery.
Inflection in the Desert
Indian Route 59 cuts into a cliff north of Chinle, Arizona and creates a visual inflection point on the desert floor. It appears to have turned the curved face of the cliff inside-out as the earth has been displaced to provide a gradually sloping road into the higher terrain. It’s a little “X” on a desert landscape dominated by irregularly sculpted cliffs and ridges.
A Gift Unwrapping
The desert floor was obscured by cloud…until, as if by magic, the landscape unwrapped itself before our eyes and revealed a multifaceted gift to engage and entertain our vision. The Grand Canyon…an unwrapped gift of visual delight…a single glimpse through a hole in the clouds returns us to a childhood moment of anticipation and excitement. Merry Christmas.
Approaching the Purgatoire
Rounding the northeast corner of New Mexico, the Purgatoire River comes into sight and our thoughts turn toward the Colorado landscape…The flat eastern lands spread before us providing a stark contrast to the rocky elevations of the west. The seemingly limitless expanse of flat terrain is punctuated by the gangling fractal growth of the river as it claws its way across the plain…its path is emblematic of our own wandering, seeking, turning, twisting, repeating, consuming, eroding, living, and breaking…and as we look upon the nature of its imperfections, we see beauty and a path unencumbered by planning and thought…a beauty that comes through following a way that is unique and guided by the influence of gravity and the inherent nature of water to move many particles as one in the flow of the river and the motion of the tides.
Snow and the Way
Snow abounds in the Rockies, drawing a stark contrast of light and dark between the peaks and valleys along the mountain range…The patterns created provide a twisted guide to the way through the dynamic landscape…balanced color and depth.
Watched by Scenery
If you look out your window as we fly over the Great Salt Lake, you may notice a face staring back at you from the lake at Carrington Island. Faces in the landscape fuel our imaginations and engage us in our surroundings…this engagement makes us more aware of subtle changes in the scenery and our progress across the ground. On your next flight keep the shade up, watch the landscape slip by, and use your imagination…the time will pass by quickly and it might even bring a smile to your face.
Solitude and Convergence
When we feel as though we are alone with no other human voices or visible signs of life but for our own shadow on the horizon reflecting back at us, it is natural to perceive a certain sense of solitude…We are alone and the heavens are our exclusive silent domain…And then we look at our environment more closely…The cloud that we cross under was once a contrail, a visible sign of another who passed this way before us…but they are gone, they had a different course, they had different plans…And for all their differences, that ship’s lingering spectral shadow converges with ours at a singular point on the horizon…Perhaps we are less unique than we previously perceived…Each of us leaves an echo of our journey in our wake as a message for all those who may interpret it…And when those interpreters of abstract signs follow us in our journeys, our shadows may converge foretelling our common path.
A Hole in the Twilight
Cruising along in the twilight zone above the Gulf of Mexico as dawn breaks over Tallahassee, Florida, we spy a hole in the the twilight…a glimpse at a brilliantly reflected red sunrise beneath us…Though separated from the red light by a cloud layer, this small hole allows the color to bleed through the shadows into our world and grants us an early glimpse at sunrise before the passage of dawn’s terminator.
Signaling the Day
The light of dawn rolls across the landscape illuminating the eastward facing buildings of Alexandria, Virginia and transforming their subdued facades into momentary beacons as they cast streaming golden reflections on the surface of the Potomac River.
Adeii Eechii
Wandering into the backcountry in the Navajo Nation one gets lost…I don’t mean in a physical way, rather metaphorically…the texture and color of the landscape carry us off to another world of inspiration and wonder. We lose ourselves in the sculpted orange and red pastel textured earth and find something new in ourselves that is beyond comprehension. In this moment of wonder, we see the artistic hand of the creator exercised through the patient force of the elements as the landscape is slowly sculpted, glazed and fired to form the Adeii Eechii Cliffs rambling gracefully across the edge of the Painted Desert south of Tuba City, Arizona.
Islands in a Vapor Stream
Descending into the depths of the stream, small islands protrude and the current flows around them carrying fragments of their spirits downstream…The “islands” bump up from the elevated landscape beneath as we descend along a ridge line of the Appalachians and turn to align our course with the Shenandoah Valley near Roanoke, Virginia. The ride is smooth here as we contemplate the landscape’s effect on the visible weather and we anticipate the rough ride below.
Casting Shadows on the Dawn
Flying westward on the edge of twilight toward the Mississippi Delta, the sunrise casts our shadow into the atmosphere above…Our Brocken Spectre radiates from the shadow fixed about a small halo-like glory, visible only as a bright round distortion in the spectral light of dawn. The scene is awe-inspiring for its abstraction and balance as the rays of the sun radiate behind us and our shadow reflects and radiates through the phenomenon of the spectre ahead of us.
Feathering the Blue
The thin remains of a contrail divide and dissipate into the morning sky as though a scattering of downy barbs in disarray around the shaft of a feather…As we emerge from our sheltered view between cloud layers, they delicately brush the blue of the sky before vanishing into the air over Alexandria, Louisiana.
An Ephemeral Show
A couple of hours ago we became part of an ephemeral light show…As the sun crested over the horizon behind us, the clouds and all the sky around us seemed to flash from black and white into the vibrant color of sunrise…The clouds were illuminated in a warm pink-tinged orange and the spaces in between were filled with an orange glow as every particle of dust and moisture caught the fresh blast of light…Even the air in our cockpit took on the soft orange hue of sunrise as we became a part of the show over Gulf Shores, Alabama. This moment vanished as quickly as it appeared as the orange glow receded into the white light of day, but the memory of this moment lingers in a sense of harmony as we flow through the air above the waking earth.
The Aerial Horizon – Photography
The Aerial Horizon 