Part of the process of creating Holding Pattern was finding aerial views by other photographers. Ideally, I needed a great variety of views from flights all over the globe, and my own small collection from North American flights over the past few years just wasn’t going to cut it!

I also wanted to make sure the images I used from other photographers were either used by permission or were pubic domain. One incredible source of public domain images that I used was  NASA’s archive of astronaut photography from space. As a US taxpayer, I had paid for these images already - so NASA allows me, or any other US citizen to download and use these photographs, with some limitations. They’ve done an incredible job with their archive: you can access retouched low-res jpegs of their best pics, or you can actually look at shot-for-shot unretouched high resolution scans which you can download by FTP request. Some of these photos are blurry or dusty or flat - but everything produced by the astronaut cameras is there for you to use, warts and all. They have a keyword archive, and you can also search by some pretty interesting methods, such as latitude/longitude.

(LINK)

Here’s a typical view of the earth from space:

How could I use these pictures in Holding Pattern, without switching the theme of my screensaver from travel to science fiction?

Massive creative retouching!

I flattened the horizon line (curved in the NASA photographs due to distance)

I added an atmosphere. The sky is black in NASA photos due to, um, being shot from space, so I generally collaged in a sky from a lower-altitude source - a regular commercial aviation aerial.

and then I did my usual cylindrical landscape edge-to-edge matching.

What results, above, is an aerial image that appears convincing when viewed out of an airplane window - but is in fact the entire Aral Sea. These NASA-sourced aerial views that look convincing after retouching but actually contain much larger landmasses than you’d expect! Here are some more examples:

Tip of Florida and Cuba (North is left)

Inland Western China

Thanks to these images from NASA, Holding Pattern is a truly a round-the-world trip!

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This is the first in a series of Holding Pattern secrets — in which I explain methods of screensaver construction, secret features, and easter eggs.

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Cylindrical Landscapes

People often mistake the moving aerial view in Holding Pattern for actual video footage. While using actual video footage shot from a plane would provide truly realistic motion, there are two reasons I could never use it:

– Bandwidth: Video is huge. No one wants to download a 2Gig screen saver!

– Resolution and image quality: video’s just not comparable to a photograph in terms of presenting detail and color. Yes, not even HD.

So each moving landscape in HP is not video at all, but rather a cleverly pieced, animated photograph. The photo animation has two interesting characteristics: perspectival motion (the foreground moves faster than the background) and edge-to-edge matching, which lets me use a single photograph very economically by looping it, even though it’s moving in perspective. All of this is nothing more than standard 3D animation practice.

Here’s an diagram of perspectival motion:

You can easily see where edge-to edge matching happens in the above, if you imagine side-by-side pieces moving in perspective across the field of view. The great thing about this is that the landscape is looping, but because the perspective skews so much during the animation, the loop isn’t very apparent.

The hardest and most interesting part of this process was creating landscapes that matched edge-to-edge, or as I came to call them, Cylindrical Landscapes, because one could imagine the landscape curled into a cylinder so that the edges meet (imagine a 60’s lampshade). As you can imagine, a great deal of photo retouching was involved.

Here’s a landscape before retouching:

Here’s the final retouched landscape, and the same landscape “rotated” so that the seam lands right in the middle. Cylindrical!

Here’s a whole gallery of landscapes used in HP1 and HP2 that I created on FlickR:

Link

Yes these landscapes are digital and clever, but I find them more interesting than that. Perhaps it is the intentionally straightened horizons and the evenness of value needed to make the loops - something about these landscapes represents an entirely strange, fictional Nature.

In the process of making HP, I found myself needing to go out and shoot more landscapes. Here’s a photo I shot some time after I had developed the cylindrical landscape technique:

Interesting how this photo needed almost no retouching at all!

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