Aerial photography

Some pics from my intro flight (the movie clip is small in dimensions but a bit hefty on disk space at about 20M so you might want to right-lick and "Save As..." instead of playing it in the browser)...the first two are of the HWY 93 and HWY 123 bridges. From this view if you were to look to the right you'd see the campus, not quite in the orientation that is shown. Doing a little mental rotation, the stadium is between the two bridges. To put it another way, if you're on the water between the two bridges and you look to the right (East) you'd see the stadium. During football weekends you'd hear it as well. The HWY 93 bridge was constructed just a few years ago, doubling the number of lanes on our daily commute.

These next two are of two marinas. The first is Portman, on Lake Hartwell, south of Clemson. It usually takes us about half and hour to get there by motorboat, but only a few minutes by plane. I think we were flying at about 120 mph and the boat does only about 20 mph when running at high RPMs, so that's about right: 30 min vs. 5 min. The second shot is of the Keowee Sailing Club on Lake Keowee, a bit northwest of campus. Both are man-made lakes, but Keowee is the cleaner of the two because I think they managed to clear the bottom before filling it up. At least that's my understanding of it. Hartwell is by far larger and when the level is down (like it is now) you can see some rather large stumps sticking out so you have to be careful driving in some places and keep an eye on the depth gage.

The last two are of our subdivision and our house. In the first pic you can see how low the lake is. That grassy region in the upper left is usually underwater. Right now it's a meadow where the deer and beaver play.