Sahara aerial

My flight down to Ghardaia was late at night, offering little to see. Knowing that my return flight would take place in daylight, however, I had made a point of asking for a window seat so that I could take pictures of the desert.

As I settled into my seat on the Air Algérie ATR-72, I realized that I had failed to take something into account. The window was filthy, encrusted with a thick layer of red brown dust. Taking photographs through it was going to be like taking pictures through soup.

I can’t really fault Air Algérie for this. It has to be nearly impossible to keep aircraft clean in a desert environment, and a country that is mostly desert has better things to do with its water than wash planes for the benefit of tourists. I blame myself for not expecting this.

I tried taking pictures anyway, squinting through the murk on the window. The results were disappointing. The spectacular desert landscapes that I could just about see through my grubby window turned into vague smears of rusty brown when photographed through a layer of dust.

The camera must have captured something, however, because when I pulled the photos into Lightroom and pushed the Dehaze slider hard to the right, magic happened. Suddenly, the colors and the shapes of the desert appeared. A little soft, perhaps, and the colors possibly not quite faithful. Still, the final images ended up looking far better than I expected.

Some day, I want to fly over the Sahara in an aircraft with clean windows. Until then, though, I'm pretty happy with some of these shots.