Canberra to Yungaburra (IR)

Canberra ACT to Yungaburra Queensland via Cairns, 7 August 2022
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Click on any image to see it larger (If you are on a PC at least).

These images from a plane journey from Canberra to Cairns and then by road from Cairns to Yungaburra in the Athertion Tablelands.

These are all infrared images. Since my previous post was about processing IR images in Capture One and I also mentioned processing in Lightroom and Photoshop, I indicate how I processed each image. PS is Photoshop, with modifications before and after in Lightroom, LR is Lightroom and C1 is Capture One. Not that that really tells you much except that you can get a whole range of results from any method.

10 mins from Canberra. Not clear exactly where. (PS)

I have been producing colour infrared images on and off since the early 1980s, which of course was at that time on film (and printing Cibachrome). I like the wild range of possibilities from the radical to the subtle. There are many other approaches to infrared images and I do not expect mine to be to everyone’s taste.

However, I showed these images to a visiting friend on my large computer monitor and he exclaimed “These are paintings!” and compared this image and two later from the Cairns/ Atherton Road to images by Sydney Nolan from the Red Desert series. Not something I had considered or was even aware of.

Make of these what you will. I make no claims and have no expectations. They are for me a creative challenge and a different world.

Lake Dalrymple below (west of Mackay, Queensland). Lake Upstart National Park in far distance. (LR)

Everything looks so different from the air.

Magnetic Island and Cape Cleveland. (LR)

Antivaxxers and Libertarians tell us you can’t believe any media, government or institution. Isn’t it a terrible thing that no-one tells us about the nuclear accidents that boil the land and turn the seas red.

Cape Pallarenda and Magnetic Island. (PS)

Day and night happen at the same time, as the sun turns into a moon.

Palm Islands (Esk Island, Brisk Island, Eclipse Reef, Great Palm Island). (LR)

It looks real but is it really?

Hinchinbrook Island (foreground) and Brook Islands. (LR)

The pastel shades of the released imagination.

Gould Island. Garden reef in front. (PS)

If I’d taken video footage from the air I could have made a blue movie.

Tull River. South Mission Beach in the distance. (LR)

The classic reddish colours of a Queensland autumn (though it’s actually winter).

Innisfail and Johnstone River. (LR)

As autumn fades, so do the colours.

Looking past Mulgrave River, Malbon Thompson Forest Reserve and Grey Peaks National Park to a distant view of Cape Grafton, Fitzroy Island and beyond. (LR)

We are getting closer to the tropics. You know the camera never lies so this is realistic colour.

Probably East Feluga/ Friday Pocket area. (LR)

And so is this. It’s not that I am wearing rose tinted glasses, the whole world has suddenly changed.

I think Maria Creek in the foreground; Barnard Island off the coast; Barrier Reef in the background. (PS)

The landscape is trying to turn into the Gambian flag. Perhaps we’re about to be invaded.

Just before landing at Cairns Airport. (PS)

Back to normal reality.

View from Cairns/ Atherton Tableland Road. (C1)

A desert landscape, maybe?

Cathedral Fig Tree (C1)

Needing some respite, I stopped for a while at the ancient Forest of Fangorn, not far from the Misty Mountains.

Cathedral Fig Tree (C1)

The weather was changing minute by minute.

Cathedral Fig Tree (C1).

The trees had much to say.

Cathedral Fig Tree (C1).

And dreams escaped to the sky.

Our welcoming committee to the Atherton Tablelands (C1).

And then our dreams were gathered up and returned to us by the Guardians of The Ether.

Tashkent to Urgench

Mar21

28 September 2018.
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We flew from Tashkent to Urgench, a Soviet-era city near the ancient city of Khiva, our destination for the day.

So the first images are the outskirts of Tashkent, then we fly over desert, then we approach Urgench.

The river you see in some of the later images is the Amu Darya. Urgench is built around the remains of a river, so that must be a previous course of the Amu Darya, and I presume that hundreds of years earlier, the Amu Darya flowed past Khiva.

The technical quality is not that good in many of these images so there’s not much fine detail to be seen. The shutter speeds were OK so I suspect the problem was smeared windows. Not much you can do about that as a passenger on a plane. (It may still be worthwhile clicking on some of the images for a larger size).

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In the foreground is probably Adya Lake in Uzbekistan but it may be Shardara Reservoir in Kazakhstan.
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Smoke in the desert at top right?.
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It turns out to be from twin chimneys. Probably a mining processing plant..
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Jamaica to USA

Sep26

Jamaica and USA, 22 September 2016

This is from a flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica to Charleston, South Carolina. A later flight to Los Angeles was at night and I didn’t take any photographs on that one.

Houses at the water’s edge near the airport in Montego Bay.

A couple of hours above the Florida coast. West Palm Beach maybe.

All the cloud shots are not far apart.

Approaching Charleston.

America – the land of individuality?

Charleston in the distance.

When we got to Charleston, we had to wait for maybe hours in a long security queue while the time to catch the next flight faded away. A German couple near us tried to jump the queue to where some friends of theirs were, but they were seen by officials and sent to the very last place in the line.

When I got to LA and picked up a rental car near the airport, I had to return to get the rental company to show me how to get the drivers seat back up. I had found a control to recline it but had gone too far and that control didn’t put it back up(!). There was a different control in a different location for that.

Then when I got onto the crowded freeway (at night) I found that the side mirrors were electronic and I couldn’t tell how far away other cars were. That made changing lanes quite freaky. Still, we got where we needed to go without incident.

I also spent a fair amount of time this week dealing with corrupted images and backups. When I came to start considering my California images for processing, I found I had 300 corrupted and unusable images. My backup to the Cloud is supposed to go back to 2017 when I started Cloud backup but the relevant backup only went back to May which must be when I had a motherboard change. My local backup to a Drobo was no good because only have enough space to retain recent backups. But I do have an old backup to disk from 2017. At first that seemed inaccessible but I eventually retrieved the files I needed from it. This just goes to show the value of the old adage that you should always have three separate backups.

Antigua to Montserrat

Jun6

Antigua and Montserrat, 22 September 2016

So here we are, on a tiny plane, I think the only passengers on a flight from Antigua to Montserrat.

Just taking off, we are looking through at some small wharves at the north end of Winthorpe’s Bay.

We would have taken off ENE but our heading is SW, so we’ve turned around and you can see a minor branch of the runway and the big building is probably a hangar for light aircraft.

Nearby in Fitches Creek Bay, we see some seaside mansions and St George’s Anglican Church is amongst the trees at mid left.

On the other side of the island, this is Jolly Harbour and Pearn’s Point.

On the way, we get a glimpse of Redonda, a small hunk of rock owned by Antigua but located between Montserrat and Nevis. It is difficult to land on and has no natural sources of water. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries it was a refuge for pirates and from 1860 to 1914, people lived on it, mining guano. There is a spurious monarchy of Redonda associated with it, though with only a tenuous association with the island. The island has been recently cleared of long-horned goats (probably left by pirates) and black rats, which had stripped it bare. Vegetation is now returning and the population of boobies and frigate birds is greatly increasing. Redonda is also home to five endemic lizards that are unique to that island. They include the Redonda ground dragon, Redonda tree lizard and the Redonda pygmy gecko that was only discovered in 2012. Not surprisingly, we didn’t visit there.

Now we are approaching Montserrat. This is the north and east coast.

In the background is the infamous volcano that erupted with great force in 1995, 1997 and 2010. You can see where a recent lava shelf extended into the sea.

Coming along the west coast now, from the north.

… and coming in to land at the airport.

We were met by our hosts and driven to our accommodation.

We must have taken a detour on a northerly road for this view down the east coast of the island. You can see that same lava shelf in the distance.

Sunset from our balcony.

St Martin to Antigua

May3

St Martin, Sint Maarten, St Bartholemey, Antigua, 18 September 2016

Taking off from Princess Juliana international Airport in Sint Maarten. Right beside the airport.

This is a St Martin (as opposed to Sint Maarten) view, looking north over Simpson Lagoon with Marigot at the right at the end of the lagoon and Anguilla on the horizon.

The inner suburban area of Sint Maarten.

That strip in the middle is Philipsburg, commercial centre of Sint Maarten.

The docks area of Philipsburg.

This is now Saint Barthelemy, an island to the south-east of Sint Maarten. The main centre of Gustavia in the foreground, Gustavia Industrial Zone in the cove at mid left and Gustaf III airport.

The beaches are Anse du Gouverneur and Anse de Grande Saline. Saint Barthelemy was Swedish from 1784 when Louis XIV exchanged it for trading rights to Gothenburg, to 1878 when they gave it back. It was then part of Guadeloupe but has been separate since 2003.

Antigua. This is McKinnon’s Pond and Runaway Bay, near the main town of St Johns.

St John’s.

This is the Coolidge Cricket Ground, colloquially known as the Sticky Wicket Stadium, where Curtley Ambrose and Viv Richards no doubt played many times.

Near the airport with some older buildings.

Having arrived where we were staying at English Harbour, I am on the floor with the dog at the local general store.

Santo Domingo to St Martin

Apr12

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, St Martin, Sint Maarten, 15 September 2016

Santo Domingo Port.

This is just after taking off in the plane. The next eight images are flying along the south east coast of the Dominican Republic and the first ones are at or close to Santo Domingo. They’re through a plane window of course so there are sometimes some reflections from inside the plane.

AES Andres electric power plane and LNG importing facility.

Still the port, incorporates both of the previous images.

San Pedro de Macoris.

El Soco.

Isla Catalina and La Romana.

La Romana.

Boca de Yuma.

Juan Sanchez Ramirez landed at Boca de Yuma in 1808, coming from Puerto Rico, and routed the French, who at that time controlled Hispaniola, in the Battle of Palo Hincado. He then became Governor of the Spanish Colony of Santo Domingo until he died in 1811. He is known as “the father of the Dominican Republic”.

Juanilllo, the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic.

Puerto Rico was probably covered in cloud (so I have no other images of the main island) but this is Ceiba Ferry Terminal, at the eastern tip of Puerto Rico.

Vieques National Willdlife Reserve and Punta Este, Vieques Island, Puerto Rico.

Culebra, Puerto Rico.

St Martin/ Sint Maarten is an island divided between France and the Netherlands. This is the western tip, Les Terres Basses, St Martin. Anguilla in the background.

Cupecoy Beach. Sint Maarten in the foreground to the right, St Martin behind. Simpson Bay Lagoon behind the Sin Maarten buildings. The little white terrace houses on the left edge of the beach are half in St Martin and half in Sin Maarten.

This image provides a good summary of the difference between St Martin and Sint Maarten at the time. Sint Maarten was an overdeveloped cruise ship destination, with multi-storeyed hotels and casinos, and more than 50% urban. St Martin was more just a place where people lived with some nice undeveloped locations, much more interesting to us.

Sint Maarten, moving a little along the coastline.

A resort near the airport.

And here we are coning to land low over the beach. I will have an image in a later post showing how this looks from the beach.

This is a view from where we were staying at Over the Hill Guest House in Grand Case, nearing sunset.

We knew we were in the hurricane season in the Caribbean but fortunately we did not encounter one. A year after we were there, St Martin and Sint Maarten were hammered by Hurricane Irma, which passed directly over the island. 95% of buildings in St Martin were damaged and 60% rendered uninhabitable. Also, 70% of the buildings in Sint Maarten were damaged and a third destroyed. Our accommodation appears to have reopened after being closed for around a year though now they probably have few guests due to COVID-19. Most of the buildings in adjoining properties show in Google Earth as still levelled to the ground.

Houses on a nearby hill.

Night-time view in the same direction.

From Havana to Santo Domingo

Jan23

Havana, Cuba to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 12 September 2016

I’ve just come back from a weekend covering the Thredbo Blues Festival and now have 3,000 images to process, so these posts may slow down a bit for a while.

On Monday around 12:30pm we were driving back from Thredbo. Normally I would have been playing table tennis and have had my car parked outside the centre. Had that been the case, the car would have been pulverised by hail, golf-ball sized or even larger. The windows would have been broken, all the panels dented and the car may have been written off.

Such are the incidents of the unfolding Climate Crisis. Especially with the current political corruption and paralysis, particularly in the US and Australia, it is merely a foretaste of what is to come, and not just in Australia.

Today there was also a fire burning on the edge of Canberra, just a few kilometres from where I live (though blowing in the opposite direction). Homes and an industrial area were threatened. A recycling centre is burning, creating hazardous smoke and Canberra Airport was closed for much of the day. Today was a high wind day. That fire is relatively under control but further high winds are forecast, including for a large area of south eastern New South Wales where there are several large fires burning out of control. Conversely, conditions may also be easing from tomorrow and the Indian Ocean Dipole (a major trigger) has now moved to neutral.

OK, back to the Cuba/ Caribbean trip. This post shows images taken from the plane between Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

We have taken off from Havana and are now flying east over Cuba.

The farm land looks productive.

Perhaps you have read of the insect apocalypse. 80% decline in insect numbers over the last forty years, perhaps worldwide, at least Europe and the US. Global warming is a factor but probably a greater cause is use of insecticides and other agricultural poisons. Perhaps Cuba is fortunate here, because US sanctions may mean they have no access to modern toxic chemicals from companies such as Monsanto.

We’re still over Cuba, but now the coast and islands at the eastern end.

I’m pretty sure this is the western tip of Haiti.

For those with limited knowledge of geography, the island to the east of Cuba is Hispaniola, which is divided into Haiti to the west and the Dominican Republic to the east.

I have read that you can see the boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic from space. Haiti is quite deforested and the Dominican Republic not at all.

This goes back to the days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic (1930-1961). Dictators are usually bad news but he preserved the forests and sent the army in to ruthlessly suppress illegal logging. Haiti on the other hand is one of the poorest countries in the world with little effective government and the whole countryside was stripped bare.

It was too cloudy for me to see the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We are by now over the Dominican Republic (and probably for one or two of the previous images).

A large dam with a city near by.

Agricultural land

Probably the coast near Santo Domingo.

Head in the Clouds (Lahad Datu to KK)

Aug18

14 May 2019, Lahad Datu, Sabah, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

These are images from two flights, from Ladah Datu to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah and from Kota Kinabalu to Kuala Lumpur. They are all monochrome conversions of infrared images.

When leaving on the plane from Lahad Datu I was instructed by a stewardess that I was not allowed to take photographs out the window during takeoff because the camera is an electronic device. That has never happened to me previously and astonished me as the camera is hardly going to be sending out wifi signals. Consequently, most of these images are of clouds.

Not long before, we took off from Lahad Datu in Eastern Sabah.

We are flying over Sabah.

Rivers and mainly cleared land below here.

The clouds could be quite majestic though.

This is near Kota Kinabalu. We have landed and taken off again.

I was able to photograph clouds over the South China Sea for a while until the visibility closed right in.

Now we are over mainland Malaysia.

A small sea-front village.

Workers’ cottages, probably, beside the ubiquitous palm oil plantations.

Palm Oil plantations.

This was the last post of our trip to Sabah. You can see links to all the other posts in the Sabah Itinerary post.

Next, a return to the last few days in Havana in the Caribbean trip.

KL to KK (Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu)

May23

Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu, South China Sea, 1 May 2019.
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The images in this post are taken from a plane above the South China Sea, flying from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu, on my way to a two week wilderness photography excursion in Sabah, formerly British North Borneo.

Leaving KL Airport.

Still over the outskirts of KL.

Taking photographs from a plane requires a relatively clean window. Internal reflections can be a problem and sometimes one side of the plane is better than the other. A rubber lens hood against the window might help for the internal reflections. You need a high enough shutter speed to account for the vibrations of the plane.

Haze can be a problem but I don’t think a polarising filter would help as I think it would pick up diffracted colours from the plane’s windows. Post processing is likely to make a big difference. Infrared can help too as it tends to cut through the haze.

Islands in the South China Sea (I can’t work out from Google Earth exactly which ones).

Coast of Sarawak.

This and the next one is probably the coast of Sabah, possibly Brunei.

Approaching Kota Kinabalu.

All images are infrared, taken with a camera with a converted infrared sensor. There is a lot of scope for variations in colour in processing colour infrared.