Above

On Satisfaction

This is Reading Photographs, a newsletter for those interested in remarkably mundane photographs and why the details, ideas, emotions, memories, connections and beliefs they arouse make them meaningful.

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I’m a middle-aged man. I’ve been flying in planes since I was kid going on family vacation to Myrtle Beach and Walt Disney World. Nothing about the air travel experience is particularly awe-inspiring. And yet, every time I fly and manage to get a window seat, I want to take photos of everything I can see below.

It’s not that I have an affinity for aerial photography, it’s more the novelty of what I can see, how I can see, when above the world.

Shooting with film on an airplane, in this day and age, is onerous. You can’t even load film into your camera until you’re through security and at your gate, lest it get damaged by TSA’s intense x-ray machines. And even then, you have to stand there, idly, as they wipe each roll with some little piece of cloth before putting into a machine that will tell them I’m not going to blow the plane up.

And, at least for me, film behaves differently at altitude. Or at least there are things to consider that I have a hard time remembering to consider. Light is more intense, as there’s less atmosphere for it to filter through. You have to work to not get a damn wing in the shot. And my film shots taken during air travel tend to be particularly grainy, to the point of worthlessness.

Except for these two.

Both were taken on the same trip, but one while flying into Portland, the other flying out of Portland. The top one, bathed in the orange of the evening sun with the Columbia River stretching back to Mt. Hood, makes me feel warm. The other, again of Mt. Hood but in closeup, cloud-enrobed splendor, was taken in the afternoon, and I remember gasping when I first got the roll developed and saw this among the prints. It made quite a few rounds on tumblr back in the day, often without crediting me.

I’ll be flying a lot this weekend. I probably won’t have a camera on me, nor have a window seat. But that’s ok. I think these two photos satisfy my desire for a bird’s eye view.