Wendell Folks Alaska Trip - Page 6.

July 21, 2007:  Day TWO continues with a fly-by of Mount Rushmore, South Dakota.  This is the second National Park Service site for today in just 2 hours and 22 minutes of flying across South Dakota.  Terry took this shot in a wide-angle mode.  It puts the monument in perspective with the Black Hills area of South Dakota.  (They look pretty green to me.)  I drove through this area in June 1998.

Here is Wendell's wide shot during the fly-by.  there are a few reflections from the inside of the window.

Here is the winning shot I cropped from one of Terry's photos!  The original photo is shown below, but shrunk to fit on this page.  This photo is cropped to be close to 960 pixels wide, then re-sampled to end up at 960 x 777 pixels for maximum resolution in this smaller size.

This is the photo it came from.  This original size of this photo was 2288 x 1712 pixels.

This is a typical view as seen from the visitors center with a suitable telephoto lens using a linear polarizing filter.  That is how the sky got to be the DARK BLUE color you see here. 

And now we continue our trip "North to Alaska" and say goodbye to Mount Rushmore.  When I drove by here in 1998, I took a 35mm photo from that "S-curve" down there in the center of this photograph.  I used a polarizing filter when I took that shot way back then.

Sheridan Lake is about 6.5 statute miles north of Mount Rushmore.  Terry took this picture on the left side of the airplane.

Turning the camera to the front gives this photo taken about 1 minute later.   This part of South Dakota has plenty of forest land.

More to come.  Please bear with me as I find the time to create these pages and post the pictures.  As of right now, there are 423 photos and maps in the new photo web directory I have created for the "Alaska Trip" story.  If you figure around EIGHT pictures per page, that comes to 53 pages!  Wow!  That was the first time I gave that any real thought.  I am also trying to keep the photo sizes under 200 kilobytes to give good resolution and not take too long to load the pages.