What happens when Dallas goes home, instead of going out? Produced by The Well Creative Productions Drone Videography – Cash Sirois Edited By – Jason Seely
What did Dallas look like the night of Friday, March 20, 2020? It was the first night of the “shelter in place” protocols in Dallas to try to stop the COVID-19 virus.
I’m a sucker for interesting drone photography. I love a video done to a good piece of music, and even better when it seems the music and the moving pictures take each other in their arms and dance through three or four minutes, putting a smile on our faces.
TheWellDelivers.com (@TheWellDelivers) put this together, with drone photography by Cash Sirois, and music by a band I don’t know, The Bastards of Soul.
And it’s close to perfection.
KERA-TV, our local public station, uses the film in the interstices between the end of a program that doesn’t quite fill its slot, and the next program’s start. I looked for it under KERA’s name, but couldn’t find it. KERA has a couple of other films I really like, including “The Million Dollar Monarch,” and “The Chip that Jack Built,” a joyful honorific to the Jack Kilby who invented the integrated circuit and won a Nobel for it.
But it’s unfindable from KERA’s site, for me. I caught the credits on one of those showings, and found it by looking for Cash Sirois.
(I hope Raul Malo comes back soon, on a night I can see him.)
Last shot from the film by The Well Creative Productions.
A few other television stations have similar films about their cities. These could be a good geography exercise, or maybe part of a project if geography teachers still assign students to report on one state or city.
More likely, it’s just an enjoyable way to see some of the sights, and to get an idea of what it means to record history, to capture history in the making.
Have you seen other films we ought to know about?
Wash your hands. Cover your sneezes and coughs.
More:
The Bastards of Soul are a Dallas-origin band that’s been around about four years, with people who have been around a lot longer than that; read about them in the Dallas Observer
See below, another drone video of Dallas, released the same date the video above was shot; different views, different tone (shot earlier, you can tell by the colors of the buildings)
Nice drone shots of Dallas before the shutdown, from TappChannel4.
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Recently ran across this photo of Utah’s Mt. Timpanogos in the snow. You can see how majestic the mountain is dressed in white, and how its glory can bring awe and joy to people in the valley.
Evening view of Mount Timpanogos from Provo, Utah, January 7, 2008. Photographer is identified only as A4GPA. Wikipedia image, Creative Commons license.
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Lonely tree in a western thunderstorm. Screen capture of Wesley Aston’s film.
Wesley Aston is a Utah-based photographer whose work I’ve admired for some time. He photographs the rocks and skies of Utah, so much of which I trekked as a youth (less, later). One of my great pleasures was to sit on a mountainside, probably long after we should have gone down the trail to safety, to watch thunderstorms push over a mountain range, plunge into a valley and rush toward us, or maybe away from us.
At the time I wished I had photographic equipment that had not really been invented yet in non-governmental circles, to capture those scenes.
Aston does that. He’s got the equipment. He knows how to use it.
This is the kind of work that should be standard fare in geography classes in public schools, but is not.
Oops. Misattributed, misidentified photo. Turns out this is really from the Atacama Desert in South America. Point still stands, but I got hoaxed on the identification of the photo.
Even just in cracks in the desert clay.
Near Hanksville, Utah. Alt National Park and Forest Service photo. Atacama Desert, South America.
Desert Bloom near the MDRS (Mars Desert Research Station), Hanksville, Utah. Alt National Park and Forest Service photo, by Emily (@ienjoyhiking)
Hmmm. Too far south, too dry an area for me to recognize the species right off the bat. Anyone got suggestions?
It’s difficult to get a picture of what the United Kingdom really looks like. Imaginations and assumptions can distort decisions that affect our lives. We often hear the idea that there is simply no more room in the country. In reality, just six per cent of the UK is built on.
‘The UK in 100 Seconds’ is a provocative and thought provoking film that rearranges the United Kingdom’s land into 32 categories and divides them over 100 seconds. Each second equates to 1% of what the country looks like from the air.
Made by guerrilla geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison and filmmaker Jack Smith, the film was made by travelling from Tongue in the north of Scotland to the New Forest in the south of England. Each second of the film covers roughly one metre of Raven-Ellison’s walk through moorland and peat bogs, down a runway and over a dump.
Made in collaboration with Friends of the Earth, the film gives an honest reflection of what land looks like and how it is used in the United Kingdom and raises some challenging questions. A major inspiration for Raven-Ellison making the film is the amount of space that is used for feeding livestock and the question – what if we made more space for nature?
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Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM, Department of Interior) great photographer Bob Wick captures a photo that separates the redrock lovers from everybody else.
The road seems to dead end in the mountains ahead. Nobody visible in the land for miles around. It’s either incredibly desolate and lonely, or among the most beautiful, everyday views among rocks of incredible beauty you’ll ever see and remember forever.
Caption from America’s Great Outdoors, Tumblr blog of the U.S. Department of Interior: Heading south from Hanksville, Utah, towards Lake Powell, highway travelers bisect the remote Henry Mountains – the last area mapped in the lower 48. The 11,000-foot forested peaks of the main mountain range rise to the west, while two distinctive summits, Mount’s Ellsworth and Holmes, jut skyward from the rolling red sandstone mesas to the east. Known as the “Little Rockies,” these peaks are studied by geologists around the world as a classic example of igneous rocks, formed deep within the earth’s mantle, thrusting through the overlying sandstone layers. The Little Rockies have been designated as a National Natural Landmark for their geological significance. The peaks also provide habitat for desert bighorn sheep and numerous birds of prey. Photo by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management, @mypubliclands
Outdoors people in Utah usually know the Henry Mountains. There’s a buffalo herd there, open to hunting. It’s an amazing rock formation in the middle of other amazing rocks, a towering landmark for miles.
Hanksville would have to be invented by a good fiction writer if it didn’t exist, a desert town where everybody stops who passes by, with nothing really to commend it but the fact that it’s there, and populated by people of great character. Who names a town “Hanksville?”
Who wouldn’t like to be on that road?
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I like to use films like this as warmups to a year of history, and as a reminder once we get into studying the history of space exploration, of just how far we’ve come in understanding the universe, and how big this place is.
Of course, that means wer are just small parts.
The Eames’s genius showed the scale of things, from a couple picnicking in a park, to the outer reaches of the universe, and then back, zooming into the innermost reaches of a human down to the sub-atomic level.
There’s a series of these films; this one, published on YouTube by the Eames Office, was done in 1977, one of the later versions.
How can you use this in class, teachers? (I recommend buying it on DVD, as I did; better sound and pictures, generally.)
The very recognizable, famous Eames Chair and Ottoman, from Herman Miller. Ideally, you can sit in your Eames Chair while watching “Powers of Ten.” Herman Miller image.
Yes, this is an encore post. Defeating ignorance takes patience and perseverance.
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Frustratingly, the only information from @BestEarthPix is “Oregon, USA.” It’s a mule deer, in a lake. Which lake? Who was the lucky/skilled photographer? No details.
Can you supply details? The photographer should get credit, I think.
The Flat Mountain arm of Yellowstone Lake at sunrise, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 2016. Image courtesy Neal Herbert/Yellowstone National Park. Gado Images/Alamy Stock Photo
How disappointing, and maddening, that what looks like a great image turns out to be faked.
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Jeff McGrath (@youtah) on Twitter: Utah Lake is just stunning right now. This was taken at the Northern End with my drone while flying for recreational fun. #utwx #dronephotography #recreationaldrone
Northern end of Utah Lake, near Lehi, probably near the old boat launch and harbor near where the old amusement park Saratoga was (now a town loaded with housing tracts).
My grandfather, Leo Stewart, Sr., came into the world 30 or so miles south, in Benjamin, Utah, named after a family patriarch of sorts, Benjamin Franklin Stewart. When he was very young, my grandfather said, they’d boat out a half-mile or so into the lake and look down into 20 feet of water, and pick the giant trout they’d want to hook. That was in the late 19th century, of course.
In that sorry time 30 years later, some fool introduced European carp into the area, for more game fish. Carp dig up the shallow bottom and muddy the water. In my youth along the lake you could never see more than six inches into the lake. Because it was so far from everything else important, a steel plant was built at Geneva, about midway between north and south ends of the lake, during World War II — in case the mills in California were bombed. U.S. Steel eventually ended up with the plant.
From our home on the Lake Bonneville bench, 800 feet or so above the lake, we could watch the steel mill’s pouring of slag at night, a little flow of artificial magma to light the sky and look cool. The mill also dumped chemicals into the water which further clouded the view.
Tourists in Arches National Park. Arches is one of five National Parks in Utah.
Utah.com lists the days in the coming year when entry to National Parks is free. Utah.com is a promotional site for Utah, where several National Parks are big tourist draws — so they have a bias.
It’s a good bias!
Alas, only four days so far:
FREE National Park Entrance Days 2018
January 15: Martin Luther King Jr. Day
April 1: First day of National Parks Week
September 22: National Public Lands Day
November 11: Veterans Day weekend
Four free days to split among five National Parks in Utah: Arches, Canyonlands, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef. National Monuments are probably included in the free admission days, so you can add Timpanogos Cave, Rainbow Bridge, Dinosaur, Promontory Point and others.
There’s a lot to see in Utah’s mountains and redrock country — and that doesn’t include the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Flats.
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Ethnographer? It’s a person who makes a systematic study of a people and its culture, a subdivision of anthropology, sociology, history and geography all at once.
Milan Karanovic, trained as a priest, studied folk and cultural trends of Bosnians, roughly from 1900 to World War II.
And this is his typewriter:
Typewriter of Bosnian ethnographer Milan Karanovic. Take careful note of special keys to accommodate Bosnian spellings. Typewriter on display in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Halabi.
Photo of Milan Karanovich, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Zivot i rad” translates to “life and work.” Image by Jonathan Halabi.
Milan Karanovic was born in 1883 in Great Novljansko Rujiška. In his teens he moved to Sarajevo, graduated high school and attended seminary, graduating by 1909 and assuming duties as a parish priest (Orthodox?) in the Krajina region village of Rujnić. We know he published a study of the “village” of Sarajevo in 1907. On the wrong side of local authorities in World War I, he spent much of the war in prison. His publications resumed by 1925, and proliferated through 1937. He died in 1955.
Spring comes a few hours earlier every year as the planet warms; plants that used to blossom in March and April, now blossom in February. Mexican plum blossoms in Dallas, Texas, February 17, 2017. Photo by Ed Darrell, iPhone 6; please share with attribution.
Spring comes earlier every year in Dallas. Our Mexican plums used to blossom in March and April; for the past three years, we’ve had blossoms well before spring even comes. Last year we had a cold snap that took the young fruit out, after a premature blossoming.
It’s a sign of creeping global warming. Every year I marvel at Al Gore’s powers to convince our Mexican plum to blossom early, part of the “global warming conspiracy” so many fear.
That is, this is a symptom of global warming that cannot be faked, that is from observation, and not from models.
With flowers on fruit trees come hopes of a bountiful harvest. Dreading the underlying meaning of such an early blossom does not change our hopes, nor the birds’ hopes, for a good plum harvest.
It’s not just a beautiful photograph. It’s a rather rare phenomenon beautifully captured by Göran Strand, and wonderfully explained by Plait at his blog at Slate:
And here he is once again: That photo above shows that’s quite uncommon sigh: a fogbow! But this being Strand, even that’s not unusual enough. For him, it had to be even more difficult to track down. That’s not just a fogbow, it’s a lunar fogbow!
Fogbows are similar to rainbows, in that they’re caused by water droplets, but in detail they’re very different. In a rainbow, sunlight is bent and reflected inside a raindrop, and sent off at an angle. The drops are big compared to the wavelength of light, so they act a bit like mirrors. Each color of sunlight, though, bends at a slightly different angle, separating them, creating the multihued rainbow.
Strand has photos to sell in various formats. I see in a lot of offices, “inspirational” posters with good photos and occasionally-pithy-but-often-banal sayings and platitudes, hoped by bosses to spur productivity on the cheap. Order up a sizable print from Strand, get the full description of the photo, and mount it in your office instead. You’re likely to discover than genuine natural beauty from awe-inspiring photos spurs creativity and productivity more than the stock photos and stock sayings.
Those photos are starting points for learning, too, teachers. Real photos, worthy of any history, economics, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, geological science or environmental science class.
National Science Foundation tweeted this out: “#photooftheday: Moai under the #MilkyWay. #space #galaxy #astronomy #science http://bit.ly/2ffTmVZ Image credit: Anne Dirkse”
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
