google abstract

Not long ago, roaming on Google Earth, I stumbled on an image that I could admire as abstract art.  Perhaps it was this one:

Now and then I even found something that, if found in an art museum, wouldn't obviously be an aerial photograph at all, but might just as well have been an abstract or surreal painting, or sometimes a watercolor, were it not for the signature.

It's remarkably hard to predict when I'll find one.  One can't just head for a famously beautiful place and expect to find this kind of abstract interest.  Most famous dramatic landscapes look too obviously like themselves from the air, though this well known object in the center of Australia almost works, perhaps because the geometric arrowhead shape draws the eye away from a too-literal recognition.   

But usually it's hard, which makes it fun.  Shorelines, for example, all have a familiar-looking white foamy line where sea meets land, while craggy shorelines, from the air, look just like craggy shorelines.   To make a shoreline recede into abstraction, I have to find a very long, very flat beach, so that I can zoom way out.  And still I'm not sure it works.

Comments

[Peter]

Something's working for me in that last shot, though. Are those mountains to the left of the shore? Is the dark substance in the water the mountains' reflection or their extension into the sea? What accounts for the abstract shapes in the water? Clouds' reflections?

The shots look otherworldly, all of them. I guess that's because I'm used to photos of only other worlds from this distance.

But the second shot -- the one with the owl and the raven fighting? -- doesn't look so otherworldly now.

[Jarrett]

The last image is a very long, very flat beach -- from Fraser Island, Queensland. The reddish things in the NW are lakes of some sort, appearing amid a flat expanse of coastal scrub that can often appear red from the air. I suspect that if all the reds were greens, this picture wouldn't be as interesting. It's the sense of familiar landscape but wrong color that makes it otherworldly. Australia does that to me all the time.

Glad you saw an owl and a raven. It may have been the green pic's resemblence to surrealist things my stepfather was painting 35 years ago that got me seeing Google Earth this way.

[dale]

(o)

[Silvia / Salix]

Very cool images! I love the green "watercolor" one, it's just beautiful! It's amazing the images that can be found on our own planet.