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Re: airplane window technique?
First, get a seat on the shady side of the plane. Few airplane windows, even for pilots, are clear. They're often dirty, scratched, distorted, pitted, infiltrated by water that turns to frost at altitude... It's a big help not to have the sun shine on all that. Second, shoot a lot of telephoto, or make sure that you're focusing beyond the window itself. If the window has stuff on it, a digital camera with autofocus (which they all have) will sometimes focus on the window rather than the scenery. Third, it helps to have a camera with a flip-out viewer in the back, so you can shoot at angles that you can't see while belted in your seat. This set of shots was taken from a back seat in a 777 that had no window. I angled the camera to take shots out of a window partially obscured by the seat in front of me, when it wasn't obscured when the passenger there reclined. That's why most of the shots in that series were taken while ascending or descending. That's when the flight attendants tell you to put your seat back forward. I actually didn't see most of the scenes in that series, except through the angled viewer in the back of the camera. This is a great drawback of my new Canon 30D. I *have* to look through the viewfinder. Once my old Nikon is fixed, I think I'll go back to using that instead for this kind of work. Fourth, most pictures taken from altitude will be a bit hazy. You can reduce much of that in Photoshop under Image/Adjustments/Levels. Move the sliders that adjust the white, black and gray points of the photo. This often works much better than adjusting brightness/contrast, color saturation or color balance. Once a veteran showed me how it was done, it was like a veil was lifted from my eyes. I still have a lot to learn, but that was one excellent lesson. Oh, and PhotoShop isn't the only tool that does this. The Gimp does it too. So does much of the photo software that comes with cameras these days. iView Mediapro too. There are responses to this message:
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