close your eyes and hope for the best

Aerial photograph: pulpmill wastewater lagoon. (click image to enlarge)

One friend of mine said this image reminded her of so many butterflies. Another saw in it the suggestion of tree stumps. Most others, well, most of you can guess what the photo reminds most people of. When my friend and pilot Bo Curtis and I were photographing Canada from the air, we looked for angles where we could isolate just two of these rounded shapes in a composition, our obvious intention being to produce a photo that would, of course, resemble a nice pair of eyes.

…the ground-based observer is in the position of one hopelessly viewing a painting edge on. By contrast, seen from directly overhead, the grandest of landscape subjects, mountains, often resemble little more than flattened rubble.

While very few animals even recognize themselves in a mirror (and I must admit, sometimes I have trouble with that myself), it is probably a safe guess that ours is the only species that abstracts diverse and added meanings out of our patterned world.

We are sometimes amazed to discover a face in a cliff or in clouds, even though all it takes is finding among varying colour or tone a scheme of two circles, a line, and another line ;- |

In landscape photography, no perspective is as pattern-rich as the aerial one. It is also a particularly flattened one for several reasons, not just the fact that everything is almost always shot with the lens at a single plane of focus, that is, at infinity. It also happens that flat subjects, such as this one, are usually the richest to explore from the air. Prairie fields and shallow water (where a polarizer reveals rich colours and intriguing shapes below the surface) yield all kinds of “found art”, where the ground-based observer is in the position of one hopelessly viewing a painting edge on. By contrast, seen from directly overhead, the grandest of landscape subjects, mountains, often resemble little more than flattened rubble.

The aerial perspective is also flat sensually. On the ground, we experience landscape with all of our senses. We hear the brook or the bird song, taste the mountain water, smell the flowers, feel the texture of trees and stone. From above, not counting the overpowering engine and prop barrage from the aircraft itself, the experience is almost always exclusively visual, although this instance was an exception: we could actually smell our subject.

This is an overhead view from about a thousand feet (our typical shooting altitude) of a lagoon for treating wastewater from a pulp mill. The nodes are large platforms under which aerators whip the effluent into a creamy froth; not the most sensuous subject, but appealing from a distance when isolated out of the surroundings. Pulp and paper being one of Canada’s main industries, we found ourselves photographing these oxygenating ponds in numerous locations across the country, notably near Kamloops and Fort Frances, but this was the prettiest.

© J.A. Kraulis

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