My Favorite Picture

[NoWingsAttached]

Every time I look at this I can find something new. There are so many photographic elements, like layers of an onion.

What jumps out first is the Cloud line above the rotor. Then your eye is drawn down to the indistinct underbelly of the clouds, but you can't tell where they end and the clear atmosphere underneath begins. It melts like warm butter into the treeline horizon, a texture that mimicks the cloud tops. Deep, deep greens, but not sharp outlines of a knife edge. Rather, a muted haze that just barely blends to the blue atmosphere in the farthest backgrounds to the left of the image.

So your eye is drawn down, off left, then flows from far end of the distant taxiway - which starts you on your journey to the gyro in the foreground from a watery heat shimmer 2000 feet in the distance at the high spot in the road, midfield in front of the passenger terminal.

The yellow centerline draws you down in a J hook, bending to the underbelly of an airframe designed and proven to withstand a 50 mph hard hit with the tarmac, and allow the aging pilot to walk away with a bloody lip and a broken pinky... And rebuild the gyro for a couple hundred bucks plus a rotor.

The yellow line neatly passes throught the nose wheel, and beckons you to jump in, take the bright red Comtronics helmet off the seat, belt up, clear, fire 'em up and call a TO on RW one seven...

...To follow that plane taking off in the background, just 11 O'clock off the top of the windscreen just above the soft treeline horizon.

There's more.

The top of the nose cone tangents the pavement edge and grass. The blue taxi light found to the rear of the redesigned Air Command lines up with the RFD HS.

Then you start to notice something odd. The tailwheel is mysteriously off the ground! (This is the only element I photoshopped - there was a rubber block under the tailwheel to level the gyro).

The mains are sitting on the (vertical) construction seam of the taxiway pavement.

The forward rotor strut intersects the base of the tower in the grass, at the end of the taxiway to the left.

Finally, and perhaps the most dramatic, is the lighting. The shadows on the ground are pointing you onwards to the RW, to fly. But more than that, the shadows of the contours of the HS point forward at a beautiful, aerodynamic direction to the bottom of the fuselage, and the fuselage itself is perfectly shadowed to bring out the contours and highlights in a most flattering way.

I'll read this tomorrow and wonder how many beers I'd had when I wrote this. There are at least three more artistic elements I have not mentioned. Can you find them? I just saw something else I'd missed before. Now there four things I haven't pointed out. Tomorrow it will be five. Keep up.

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God bless our soldiers. Let them never forget all those brave souls who fought, from our farmland heroes on the frozen rivers of the revolution, to the sand blasters in Afghanistan today.

God bless our men and women, each and everyone.

This is dedicated to my dad, my WWII hero who served on Guam in the Army Airforce, supporting the B-29's that went on from there to Japan.

This picture is Red, White, and Blue - for you, and the rest of the veterans.

It is the best I can do. It took me a several years to put this shot together, I hope you like it, Pop.