aerial photography

What we’re looking at: London from the Air

Air Travel,

[Gatwick Airport]

Love London?

If you do, you’ll love it even more when you see it from above, in the photographs taken by architect, photographer, and pilot Jeffrey Milstein for his newest book, “London from the Air,” published by Rizzoli.

How does Milstein get these incredible images? He shoots straight down, with the best and newest high-resolution cameras while leaning out of helicopters. And with special permission to bypass the strict laws that usually forbid aerial photography of the capital city,

In the book’s foreword, Sir Norman Foster writes, “For the visual reader, this book can delight at a purely aesthetic level and need go no further. But discerning viewers can also read much more into the photographs as they reveal the infrastructure of public spaces, parks, avenues of trees, streets, arteries of road and railways, and airport terminals where the highways in the sky finally come down to earth.”

Here are some more images from the book.

Above: Hyde’s Park Winter Wonderland, which takes place each year from November to January.

All photos courtesy Jeffrey Milstein from the book, “London From the Air,” Rizzoli

Souvenir Sunday: Aerial Geology book

Books, ,

Anyone who’s looked out an airplane window will surely have wondered about – and wondered at – the landscape below.  Mary Caperton Morton has clearly done that and put together a book that goes a long way to explaining how those great views got that way.

Aerial Geology:  A High-Altitude Tour of North America’s Spectaular Volcanos, Canyons, Glaciers, Lakes, Craters and Peaks (coming soon from Timber Press) is filled with incredible images, descriptive illustrations and fact-filled, geology-based explanations of how each site was formed and what makes each landform noteworthy.

I love all the photos in this large-format book, but one of my favorite features is the little box by each landform titled “Flight Pattern” that lets you know where you’d be flying when you’re most likely to spot the image featured.

Here are couple of images from the book:

Cape Cod – Massachusetts, credit NASA

 

Shiprock – in northwest New Mexico – credit Malcolm C. Andrews/AerialHorizon Photography

 

Travel Tidbits: Fresh art Portland Int’l Airport

Art, , ,

Fresh art at Portland International Airport

PDX Art

Window Seat, an exhibit of large-scale aerial photographic prints and handmade quilts inspired by the view artist and writer James W. Earl had out of airplane windows between Indianapolis and Portland is at Portland International Airport through October 31, 2014.

Earl is a professor of English at the University of Oregon and his illustrated explanation about his interest in this subject – and how he got the images he worked with -is a great read.

Of the image above Earl writes:

“My delight in this image has little to do with planets or any other imagined resemblance. It’s more purely abstract, like classical geometry, like abstract art. Why do these fields strike me as so perfectly balanced, so perfectly . . . beautiful? As always, each of the squares is different. I love the two pearl-like small circles above, echoing the larger ones. (Pearls? My imagination won’t quit. I found myself calling this image “Cherry Pie,” before I finally settled on “Farm,” which is what it actually is.) For scale, note the tiny barn in the lower left corner.”