On A Clear Day You Can See Greenland!

One interesting aspect about traveling back from Europe is that it’s broad daylight all the way.  You leave at 2 pm and you arrive at 4 pm the same day (after being in a metal tube for 10 hours or so).  When I have the chance to select my seat, I always go for a window seat on the right side of the place.  If the weather is clear you get some spectacular views of Greenland so I was looking forward to that yesterday.  That didn’t happen because although there were breaks in the cloud cover, the amount of snow in February gives you nothing but white for 100’s of miles.  In fact, distinguishing between the clouds and the ground isn’t that easy and taking a picture of it is even harder (especially through plane windows which really screw up photography).  However, I am undeterred because I’ve actually done this trip a number of times and so here are some pictures from last August taken 37 thousand feet above Greenland.  Enjoy!

So how often does anyone see Greenland?  I mean really.  It just isn’t a popular place to go!

Airplane windows have polarizing and other films on them.  This really messes around with the light meters in the camera (meaning exposure calculation) and it shifts color.  I know this and so to fix that, I expose a little high and then in post processing, I bring the color temperature back up a little (warmer) and restore the black point.  It’s mostly the black point that makes the difference in contrast. Still, I am not happy with the above photo as there is simply not enough color (it wasn’t there in that light to be recorded) and there is very little contrast.  So I moved it to Black and White which made for an equally dull Black and White.  What to do? I went artistic and ramped up the contrast and smoothed the details. 

Now I’m happy. :-)