A lot of my photography takes place locally, around a heavily populated southeastern Michigan. Despite the sprawl of suburbia, and mini-castles, condos, or strip malls that seem to occupy every corner, there remain a few places where one can stroll through the woods. Ironically, many of the larger areas of undeveloped land in southeastern Michigan were once toxic dumps, now deemed unfit to build upon. Sometimes there is just a simple city park tucked away in the middle of a large subdivision, where the last stand of trees were spared. The key is finding them.

Well, lately I often find myself exploring my own neighborhood via satellite. (Boy, does that sound cool to say or what?! Kinda makes you feel like you work at CTU.) Google Earth, or Nasa World Wind are great tools for doing this. Lately I find myself doing this late at night, or on poor weather days, just exploring around to see what is practically in my own backyard, without burning the gasoline and time to find it. This particular overview is a local swamp near me that I have never been to, so I simply placed my virtual thumbtack on it as a reminder, ‘hey – check this place out sometime.’

I have no idea if any photographic opportunities exist here, perhaps a rare flower, or even wishful thinking of an approachable fox den – it is simply a place I have never been to, or even knew existed perhaps 5 minutes from my front door. It’s amazing how much time you can spend just exploring your own neighborhood, which ultimately results in time and energy saved from doing it the old fashioned way. Of course, the old fashioned way is necessary to find out if that spot you just marked was leveled in the past year to make room for a new subdivision. These satellite images tend to be pretty old.

I imagine someday the detail in these satellite images will become real time, and perhaps with enough resolution where you put on a set of futuristic space goggles (Google goggles has a nice ring to it eh? – just remember you read it here first!) and actually walk around. Of course, what fun is that if you can’t get your boot stuck in a bunch of mud, listen to the wind whistling through the trees, or have a chickadee land in your hand?