[click on picture to enlarge - taken via iPhone]
This was taken about a week ago in Bryant Park during lunch time. One of those blue sky day. Perfectly blue and cloudless sky. Hardly no wind. All conditions required for skywriting.
Skywriting is this advertising medium using a small airplane, able to expel special smoke during flight. By flying in certain patterns, it creates writing readable by someone on the ground. Since the puffs of smoke dissipate very quickly into the atmosphere, the message is usually limited to one or two words. Winds cause the writing to blur, usually rapidly. To avoid that, special techniques have been developed to write in the sky in a dot-matrix fashion, which is what you see in this picture. It seems so cutting-edge, right? I was surprised to learn that skywriting was actually developed in 1922 by a pioneer English aviator, J. C. Savage.
Can you figure out what was written up there? I could not. This spring though I saw something similar in the Upper West Side on a beautiful Sunday afternoon with perfect blue sky. It read "wow". A few minutes a second word was written: "wow". Then a third: "wow". Wow, wow, wow - that's a good message, no?
NB: The white building on the right is the Grace Building, with its beautiful sloped facade. More about it here.
13 comments:
what a great pic and that building look so gorgeous.
Last time I saw a skywriter was in southern California. Cool shot.
I can only make out "AN" - the last two letters of the first word.
Woohoo! Bryant Park! I've been there. It's so exciting seeing other city photobloggers post a photo from somewhere I've visited before :)
Great shot, interesting text. I've already seen some of those messages, but didn't even suspect it was developed in 1922...
Have a great weekend!
Wow! That's a new one on me. What a great idea.
No idea, really. I guess we'll never know what was before and after IWAN L >:'/
Bonjour Eliane,
Je suis de singapour et je n'ai jamais vu le 'skywriting' ici. C'est toujours les memes choses dans la cite: metro, bistro, dodo ...!
Donc, les autres en anglais maintenant: you've a great blog up and running! When I visit photo blogs of other countries, I can't help but think that the pasture is greener on the other side! Keep up the good work.
Do visit my blog and recommend it to your friends:
www.veryclicky.blogspot.com
•travel: thank you. The Grace building has a name that suits him well. Its slope is just drop dead gorgeous. Very elegant.
•blue: We see those occasionally too. From what I read you really nead the perfect conditions to use this technique: perfectly blue sky, no wind, bid crowds.
•salian: I am happy to refesh your memory! :) I know how you feel: I am all giddy too when I recognize something in others pictures.
•gmg: I was amazed to learn it was such an old technique. Apparently, it got its big break in the Wizard of Oz where it was used to write "surrender Dorothy" in the sky. I've never seen the film but it's a big American classic from way back when.
•mike: isn't that cool! What drives me nuts is that nobody seems to be amazed by it or to even bother give that an attention. Last spring, I was like the only crazy woman smilling like a kid at those "wow" in the sky. We are so blazé sometimes.
•fénix: ah well, the mystery will remain intact.
•photolicious: tout d'abord, super comme nom!!! Comment ça Singapour est toujours la même? Vue d'ici ça a l'air due métropole si fascinante!! Ou est-ce vraiment moins vert? Je note que tu la décris comme "métro, bistro, dodo" ce qui bat à plates coutures le "métro, boulot, dodo" du commun des mortels! ;)
J'ai vu un message du genre durant une partie des Yankees récemment... c'était pour un concessionnaire de voitures, je crois.
•luc: ça confirme ce que j'ai lu: il faut un large public pour que cela soit rentable. Trop cool!
This is interesting that it is in small dots! The skywriting I have seen are a long continuous line of writing :-)
Wow....wow...wow...wow...:DDDDD
•keropok: it is quite ingenious, sisn't it?
•moi: :) :) :)
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