Cottonwoods line a trail in Niwot, CO. Photographed on 1/2/14. (Source: © Tom Yulsman) Even excluding the iPhone in my pocket, I carry a camera almost everywhere I go. And like many folks these days, I enjoy sharing what I come up with on social media. So on New Years day, I decided to try posting a photo a day — and then I figured that I should tailor what I do for ImaGeo, and post the results here. It's a bit daunting —because life happens and has a tendency to get in the way of creative endeavors. But I'm going to give it a go. The photo above is actually not my first installment in this new Pic of the Day feature. I shot another image on New Years day that I'll share soon. And it's not simply a photo. It's actually a mosaic of six images that I took with my iPhone (during a pause on a run) and then stitched together with awesome Autostitch app. I then brought it into Adobe Lightroom to tone down the vibrancy and saturation, which out of the camera were a bit over the top. What you see here is as close as I could come to what it looked like to my eyes. And that almost psychedelic aqua color along the horizon is what made me stop during my run and grab those six images. So, what about that blue and aqua color? The sky is blue because blue wavelengths of light are scattered more than other wavelengths by molecules of air in Earth's atmosphere. And that aqua color along the horizon? As this NASA explainer puts it:
The sunlight reaching us from low in the sky has passed through even more air than the sunlight reaching us from overhead. As the sunlight has passed through all this air, the air molecules have scattered and rescattered the blue light many times in many directions. Also, the surface of Earth has reflected and scattered the light. All this scattering mixes the colors together again so we see more white and less blue.
Yeah, well that still doesn't come close to describing that aqua sky. In any case, I'm posting this on January 2nd. So I need to go back in time and post something for January 1st. (Not to mention the 3rd.) I've got just the image. So please come back for that. Oh, one last thing: If you're seeing some geometric distortion in this image, you're not hallucinating. This photomosaic is representing a very broad and complex three dimensional space in two dimensions. So weirdness is inevitable.
