The expansive grid of warehouses and industrial facilities in what was once Chicago’s meatpacking district have an eerie, cyberpunky regularity. An aggressive teal/magenta color grading maxes out the Matrix/Tron vibes.
Tag: aerial
Goats and Power Lines
If you zoom all the way in, there are tiny goats in the fields between the power lines. They convey a pretty mind-boggling sense of just how big those lines are.
Main Street Lights in Canton, New York
Route 11, the main road connecting the whole North Country (we don’t have any Interstates), runs through a series of quaint downtowns, where it temporarily becomes Main St. The impressive stability of the DJI Mini 3 Pro meant that I could capture long, smooth light trails from headlights and taillights representing the evening’s traffic.
Northside Beaches
The steady, even grid of Chicago and its suburbs terminates into chaotic reality when it hits the shore of Lake Michigan, but hey—at least there’s a beach.
Solar Facility
Given that most of my research is focused on renewable energy, I love to pick up relevant pictures to include in my presentations. This solar facility outside Denver, CO, was far larger than an initial glance at the image might imply. The tiny yellow dots at the base of the cylinders in the center of the image are enormous pieces of earthmoving equipment.
Lights of the Ready Campus
I’ll be teaching my first class of the Fall 2022 semester tomorrow morning, so today seemed like the perfect day to reflect on the campus to which I’m returning. The structures amidst the trees sure look good from 100 meters up.
This image also brings up an interesting note on aspect ratios: Since the start of Decaseconds, I’ve largely been formatting my very favorite images in a 1.6:1 (i.e., 16:10) aspect ratio, such that they’d function well as desktops for my various MacBook Pro laptops. The advent of the “notch” and associated added screen real estate means that new MBPs have a 1.547:1 ratio—and thus my favorite images (like this one) are arriving with a new aspect ratio.
Civilization Gradient: Denver
My favorite feature to capture in landscape images is a gradient from sparsely populated areas to dense, urban ones. A connecting flight through Denver gave me the opportunity to add a mile-high gradient to my collection.
This picture was processed using the Super Resolution algorithm, so it’s definitely worth clicking through to view the high-resolution version on flickr.
After the Vineyard Concert
The opposite side of Equus Run (in both space and time) from Friday’s post finds a concert letting out and light trails along the normally empty Moores Mill Road.
Dawn on the Shores of the South Elkhorn Creek
Sunrise over northern Kentucky, when captured from a drone, seems to present layers on layers (creek/patio/driveways/vines/forest/interstate/forest/sky) that look like an ukiyo-e print.
Leaving O’Hare
Runways on runways on runways, with the Rayleigh-scattering-induced silhouette of the Chicago skyline in the distance, on this summer morning over O’Hare International Airport.
Lake and Subdivision
For once, the arbitrary contortions of a subdivision’s streets seem to have some purpose: fitting within the shoreline of this lake outside Denver, Colorado.
Dawn on Interstate 64
Good news, everyone! A new, much-lighter, yet equally capable drone (the DJI Mini 3 Pro) means aerial photography while traveling in a way that was never possible with my chunky Phantom 3.
In today’s image, northern Kentucky presents a classic American combination: old barns and farms, crossed by the monolithic expanse of the Interstate system.
Colorado Crossroads
Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I likewise suspect that any sufficiently populated crossroads is indistinguishable from a town.
Morning Light on the Grid
Sections of Chicago’s hinterlands that were once stockyards and meatpacking facilities have long since been converted to serve as industrial parks, but the sense of an endless grid remains.
Suburbs Outside Denver
Neal Stephenson’s “burbclaves” in Snow Crash are subdivisions-as-mini-nation-states—an intentionally silly idea in the satirical context of the novel’s libertarian dystopia. These Denver suburbs are now my internal vision of how such a burbclave would look.
Decaseconds 