Mostly Maine
Today was a great day for mountain flying! The winds were calm and the visibility was decent enough. I ended up with 180 images plus a couple of hours of video. That will keep me busy for a few days.
SOP, for me is to fly with another pilot when I’m taking pictures. Thanks Mark Bowker for flying with me today.
After a couple of test flights and a few tweaks, my plane is ready to fly. Unfortunately, the pilot is still waiting for the FAA to approve his medical certificate, but on photo shoots I take another pilot, so it’s all good.
If the weather is good we’ll either video the upper Androscoggin River or grab some shots of Mt Washington. Either, will be fun.
I’m busy improving my Final Cut Pro video editing chops, using Ripple Training. It’s an online course that digs deeply into all the nuances of FCP. Good stuff, there’s a lot to learn about that program.
I’m working to get a better handle on the scenes I see from the air. As I research the rivers and their contribution to human habitation, I’ve also relearned how recently the glaciers have disappeared and the first humans arrived. We are speaking of only 15,000 to 13,000 years ago. What did the landscape look like then?
Perhaps it had a similar appearance to the upper elevations of today’s Katahdin. Once the glaciers melted away, treeless tundra and plains were left behind. Maybe it looked something like this.
It seems the first humans arrived on foot, hunting game which included the Wooly Mammoth and Mastodons. Sea levels rose and fell and the forest crept in. As of approximately 9000 years ago, the tundra and plains had given way to tree and forests, impeding the easy movement by foot. Access and life along the rivers became essential.
I finally finished the video shot during the week of February 20. The actual shooting was not framed properly, due to the offset of the camera mounted on the airplane’s strut. Music continues be a problem, finding the right tracks is a painful process.
First take on my 2022 river project. This was taken Feb 15, 2022 along the Androscoggin River between Brunswick to Lewiston Auburn. GoProing video and flying is a bit tricky even with two pilots. Once the GoPro starts filming it cuts off the video feed, so you don’t know what you have until post. Annoying!
Hope to get back in the air on Tuesday. All dependent on second pilot, weather and other possible factors. Not sure where we are heading. Possibly photos of Mt Washington or the Rangely area or perhaps some costal or river shots.
We flew up to Old Speck on Feb 9, 2022. Nice day, light winds, Old Speck looked cold and desolate. Several members of FB’s Maine Hikers climbed it the following days. Brr!
Well, at long last, I finished updating my web pages with pictures of all of Maine’s lighthouses. All except for Petit Manan, some how I skipped that one. So enjoy.
Get healthy! Get strong!
Redo the lighthouse portion of this website. It’s a mess, I used different image galleries, different means of displaying the pictures. Should I organize them geographically or perhaps photogenically? A few 2022 calendars were printed, but they need some supporting material such as location and history of the lighthouses.
For 2022 I had planned to aerial photograph the 14 +4K mountain peaks in Maine. I’ll work on that. My sister also suggested some sort of aerial travelogue about the Kennebec and Androscoggin Rivers. That would be fun and give me an opportunity to work on my video as well as my still photography skills.
But first, I need to get healthy and I need to get strong.
Happy New Year!