Severe elevator incompetence

Today I saw something so utterly incompetent that I stopped hurrying to my flight and pulled out my camera to document it.

I went to go use an elevator at Sea-Tac airport.  I pushed the up button, and a "down" elevator arrived.  No one else had pressed a button.  I looked closer at the controls:



Closer...

...

Yep, someone installed the controls *upside down*.  Thus, what looks like the up button is really the down button, and vice versa.  How did they not notice?  What sort of comprehensive 243-point inspection procedure neglects the step of checking if the elevator goes in the correct direction?  The strangest part was that both sets of controls on that floor were reversed.  Wacky.  I pressed the down button and went up to my desired floor.

Sucking out the atmosphere

The view from an aircraft is incredible, but the atmospheric haze even on clear days dramatically reduces the contrast.  However, I realized that, mathematically speaking, the haze is adding a constant amount of light to each pixel of the image.  (The blue haze that occurs in absence of air pollution or atmospheric particulate matter comes primarily from Rayleigh scattering.  Rayleigh scattering is also the answer to the childhood question "Why is the sky blue?)  I can estimate the color value of this haze by finding a particularly dark part of the image and assuming that the actual object there is black.  Then, I can subtract that value from every pixel.  The results are dramatic:

Before:



After:



More pairings:

Bay bridge construction:



A reservoir:



Some hills:



If I really want to do this right, I should take multiple black samples to account for the fact that there is a greater distance (and thus more haze) in the top parts of the photo than there is at the bottom.  Then I can make a gradient in Photoshop between the two values.