Capturing the journey

I learned early on that the journey is often as - if not more - important than the destination. How we get somewhere is an important part of the experience of being away.

I ofen read stories about the early days of commercial aviation, and I am struck by the degree of romance that was attached to this then-nascent form of travel. It was a huge deal to go anywhere on a plane. Service mattered. The people who worked for airlines were respected. Pilots were worshipped.

Fast forward to today and the airline industry can rightfully be described as fractured. Massive, long-term financial hardship has forced airlines to cut service to the bone. Staff members are no longer revered as they once were. Instead, they're just as likely to scowl at you as you settle into your cramped seat beside the less-than-floral washroom.

Dining aloft has devolved from full-course meals served on real plates to $5 boxed lunches that may or may not have been packed last week in a faraway land.

But somewhere in this post-deregulated world, I still find some amount of joy in transiting long distances in a plane. Airplanes are kinda cool, after all. These hugely expensive examples of leading-edge technology are fascinating to watch. Whether they're being loaded on the ground or being firewalled as they scream off the runway and grope for altitude, it's clear that these machines are not your father's Oldsmobile.

With that in mind, many of my in-transit photos often focus on the shapes of these machines.

The out-the-window image was about as lucky a shot as I've ever taken. We were pulling into our gate at Logan when I first spotted the aircraft approaching overhead. I turned the camera on, hoping to grab the shot. Digital cameras are notoriously very slow to start up. I pointed the camera up and held the shutter down, hoping against hope that the thing would wake up before the aircraft sailed past us. It just made it. Somehow, the plane didn't blur as it sped overhead, either. Luck.

Only after did I realize I had also gotten the control tower into the image. Sometimes, the stars simply align.

Similarly, the second picture resulted from my fatigue on the way home. I had been randomly pulled out of line by the security screeners. OK, maybe it wasn't random. Perhaps they were ticked that I took a flash picture of my Po doll just before my luggage went into the scanner. I was wanded, frisked, patted down, and generally made to feel like the criminal that my high school English teacher always thought I'd become.

After my hands-on episode with Louie the gloved TSA security agent, I was somewhat rattled. I gathered my stuff and walked with a colleague to the gate. As I was looking down most of the way, I noticed subtle images of aircraft on the floor. I was intrigued, and not just because I thought it would look neat in my kitchen. I knew I needed to shoot them, but close-up images in the middle of a heavily-travelled airport corridor would not be easy. I didn't care.

When we got to the gate, I dropped to the floor, pulled out my camera and started composing the macro images. People stopped and stared. One lady looked up from her laptop and played 20 questions with me. Everyone seemed happy: things like this never happened in airports. When I was done, I showed some interested folks the images on the camera's screen. They all agreed it was cool - the reflected lights made it look like it was rolling along a runway. I bet it made for interesting conversation at a few dinner tables across the nation that evening.

Once again, I was lucky. I should carry this thing in my pocket more often.

Your turn: The luckiest image you ever captured was...?