A quick switch from farmland to city marks the strange bucolic character of Lexington, Kentucky.
Fields Outside Lexington
Tag: Interstate
Interstate Crosses South Elkhorn Creek
Morning light shines over Interstate 64 crossing South Elkhorn Creek in Midway, Kentucky.
Cap Concert
Summer concerts in Bushnell Park have begun and the lawn beneath the Capitol looks idyllic.
Riding Into the Sunset on Converging Paths
Interstates may seem a natural part of the American landscape, but the drone’s-eye view reveals the truth of how highways were laid atop the earlier landscape. I like the convergence of the headlights along both the country road and I-64, like two different eras running to a shared future.
Old and New Kentucky
While the Interstate system feels like an ingrained part of American culture at this point, its presence (in the Eastern U.S., anyway) is revealed as a late addition from a drone’s eye view: the original patterns of farms and country roads has this massive strip of highway laid atop it.
Equus Run Vineyard by the Interstate
The bucolic setting of Equus Run is so charming and quaint (and well-shielded by trees and hillside) that I can easily forget the Interstate runnin’ through the yard.
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.
Chicago Interstate
The grayness of Chicago-area sprawl takes on a golden hue at sunset.
A Home in the Shadows of Utah
The smooth, iterative patterns of rolling Utah hills are only occasionally interrupted by the cubic forms of little homesteads. I happened to be rolling down the Interstate at just the right moment to catch this house peaking out from the shadow of the nearby hill into the morning light.
Twentieth Century American West
Huge population growth in the American West led to a lot of new construction; I see the same thing in my remote area of Northern New York. Unlike up here, where storms and seasonal temperature cycles destroyed many of those structures after they were no longer useful, this partially inhabited area in Utah remains well-preserved.
Long Progression
A curvature-of-the-Earth-matching flatness in across the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah makes the repeating geometry of human-made structures hypnotically visible.
Western Landscape I & II
Working through processing my back-catalog of sabbatical photos, I’ve finally come to the end of those I took in California. My semester of science and good food had come to an end, and now we drove back across the continent. The drive in December meant lots of snow-covered deserts and hillsides; summer was a bit different.
The human-made structures are as insignificant as you’d expect in the face of the great, empty American West.
Water in the Desert
From the Interstate across Nevada, the desert landscape astonishes me with its variety. Far from being a boring wasteland, the expanses of waving grasses, shrubs, shallow water, and rock hills provide a spectacular mixture. Even when I know the biology and ecology behind it, my east-coast-calibrated brain still can’t quite grasp that all of this water doesn’t equal trees.
Curves Into the Distance
Crossing the American West last winter, I was struck by the profound changes to the landscape affected by large-scale infrastructure programs. Rural electrification resulted in an expectation of electrical availability, and power lines now stretch to the horizon.
In much the same way, lines of Interstate highway curve off to the distance, twinned East and West streams.
Nevada Scale, Large and Small
Great expanses of Nevada’s winter landscape look smooth and round: rolling hills and puffy clouds.
Then the landscape tucks in around the Interstate, the chunky details are more apparent. That little fence in the foreground is thoroughly dwarfed by the not-so-distant towers of rock.
Decaseconds 