I like to look at the world in Google Earth or google maps. I think the most interesting place to look at is China. So I often keep screen shots of my google trips.
I find it sad because a couple of years ago it was possible to use SOSO maps to streetviews the cities of the mainstream China where Google is not allowed to go. But it’s not working anymore for me, maybe because it’s still working with Flash.
Anyways Hong Kong and Macau are still available on Google and there is a lot of interesting stuff to see there.
This one is interesting you see that in China only, digging a mountain to build a football court.
Engeneer: Sir there is not enough place for the court because of the mountain.
Boss: No problem remove the mountain.
It was on a tad similar sort of theme and I am reliably informed that the fruit is growing by the people in the flats and consumed by different people in the same place neither of whom own the land
It kind of lends itself to the Cezanne view of everything being composed of spheres, cubes and cylinders though I wouldn’t presume …
there is a learn to draw technique based on it my neighbors eight-year-old daughter had got cubes and cylinders before they moved on
I was on Google Earth myself I was told planting a hedge I checked after seeing this post quite a few years later and there is just the fully grown hedge but here is a recent snap
Maybe I’m dangerously going into the territory of two obvious a self bias but better than it being too subtle to see
There was a bloke on this tv program doing similar work to the original post I’m not sure how traceable it is through this link but the other stuff maybe of interest
BBC less self effacing nowdays
Off topic, but we were driving through the countryside in west Georgia (US) earlier this week. I saw a farmhouse with two apple trees in the front yard that have so many apples on them, it looked like a picture of apple trees drawn by a child. I mean, they were really loaded with apples.
Here’s a visual compression: An airliner at, what, 35k feet altitude (?) but visually “below” the eye altitude of 1,022 feet. Just a touch of chromatic aberration…
I don’t like forest cutting like this, it happened close to where I live, they left 1 tree in the middle of the void… these bastards. A picture of this sad event in 2012.
This was mostly if not all just long leaf pine, likely grown (and possibly replanted) as a crop. Given this is partially private, residential land I’m not too sure of the replanting. Happens all over the place here, cyclically. If they were cutting hardwoods I’d feel differently, but our hardwoods were all cut a couple hundred years ago.
Interesting content in Hong Kong, look at the power lines, they are part of the jungle. Here we cut the trees under, to have some sort of easier access.
Maybe they can build them in stainless steel and they are good for eternity, but it certainly is interesting.
The Kowloon Reservoir was built to meet the growing demand for drinking water in Hong Kong, particularly in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. The existing supplies, primarily the Tai Tam reservoirs and Kowloon Reservoir, were insufficient to meet the needs of the rapidly growing population. The construction of the Kowloon Byewash Reservoir and the Shing Mun Dam were subsequent solutions to address this issue.
Usually, it’s not that convoluted and will just appear as an area with parallel closely-packed rows of trees. Photographically / visually, these forests are unfortunately pretty much interest-free.
Ok it’s renewable wood industry, very legitimate. With the new layout of regrown trees, I guess it’s possible to cut 1 row then leave 1 row, something like that?
I don’t know if this is common in the province of Quebec, I’ve never seen that on a satellite view.
I think around 70-80% of forest here in Scotland is non-native crop conifer. Generally quite ugly photographically. There’s an effort to revive native oakwood temperate rainforest around the U.K. but it’s pretty minor stuff
It hurts a bit to know that one will not be able to witness the native oakwood you’re talking about by the time it will take to grow back
It reminds me of a short documentary I recently watched about dying spruce forests in Europe and America that are now making place for other trees after a species of bark beetle started spreading and destroying the spruces. The video mostly focuses on Germany, as it’s made by Deutsche Welle. You can see that this apparent disaster is instead leaving shelter for wildlife and native flora regenerating thanks to birds spreading seeds or in some places being replanted manually, as they state.
Btw this is a shot I particularly liked in Turkey, south of the Ermenek dam in Karaman province, I stumbled upon it while I was playing a game of GeoGuessr and lost my sense of space, ahah.
Now it’s in my list of “Places to visit”.
There are a few small areas still surviving. These were taken in winter on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the west of Scotland and there are some others, I believe, in England.
Great shots, they look magical, congrats!
I’ll definitely take note of that place. There’s something in the Scottish panorama and architecture that always attracted my imagination since I first started learning about its history throughout school.
Those tree plantations are almost always devoid of any life, so sometimes even cutting and letting the natural processes take over is better than what was before. Of course they are almost always replanted since wood will always sell and it’s also cheaper to maintain the land like that.
This is a great video that really opened my eyes on “Human intervention” in wildlife preservation.
Nowadays see people blaming huge wildfires on climate change, how they are “worse” due to it (and it’s definitely a part), but never on human intervention and bad management of the forests.
This screenshot shows the big city in between myself and Mamacita’s Tacos Saigon (Anh Calvin’s restaurant). Just a short 11km as the crow flies but that translates into a 50 minute drive thru 17km of densely packed traffic. Chances are slim that trip will happen today, but it remains at the top of my need-to-try list.
The ‘I feel lucky’ feature is great. I guess it’s not random or it would be bits of the sea or random desert but interesting to see the variety of places in the world.
Just a touch of chromatic aberration…
I don’t like forest cutting like this, it happened close to where I live, they left 1 tree in the middle of the void… these bastards. A picture of this sad event in 2012.
