My Kind of Town...

A couple of weeks ago we had one of those instances that required us to reposition the aircraft a relatively short distance. In this case from Chicago's Midway Airport to O'Hare Airport. Now we are talking a straight line distance of maybe 15 miles. By air it is a little more than that. The Chicago area air traffic control system must obviously sequence us into the normal flow of inbound traffic to O'Hare. In this case we took off on runway 31 Center and was vectored northeast just south of downtown Chicago which gave us a wonderful vantage point to take this shot.

I refer to these as my aviation candid shots. They are taken at a time where I can have my Canon G9 ready to go and can quickly grab the shot. No, it does not interfere with the operation or safety of flying the aircraft. The ironic thing about taking this particular shot was that I would not generally think of shooting in a high density traffic area. Except the airspace where we were being vectored is probably one of the most protected areas of airspace in the country.

That being that, the image needed a little work to get it to look acceptable. Dropping a yellow filter to ad some depth to the city buildings helped but then I had to isolate the lake to it did not have a yellow cast to it. I really don't like to "fix it in PhotoShop" but it is nice to have the tools to work an image when it is one of those that you get what you can. It's not like we could have asked the controller to vector us a little to the west so we could get a better light on the city. Well... I guess I could have but then I think I might have run up against other problems.

So what do you do with an image that is not the spectacular image that you were wishing for. Go artistic... That's what I say! So thats what I did in the image above, a little edge highlighting and selection, the image takes on a whole new look. Its a bunch of fun also.

Cya... Doug