Pete’s Photographic Blog

You can get some stunning shots from a plane, but unfortunately, this usually involves hiring a small plane with the doors off and having heavy duty stabilising equipment to hold the camera. That’s fine for professionals, but what can mere mortals do when we want to take some pics from a commercial jet?

There’s certainly plenty of things working against us:

1. Small windows.
2. Restricted views - The cockpit would be ideal, but generally not feasible.
3. Dirty/Scratched windows. This is particularly exasperated if the sun is at a bad angle to the window.

Given those restrictions, here’s a few general tips that can help improve a run of the mill snapshot out of the window:

1. Be conscious of where the sun is. Taking an image into the sun through an aircraft window can totally wash the whole image out.
2. Utilise any potential spare window available. On larger aircraft, the windows near the rear exit doors are generally available for viewing out of. Also check if there is a better view through the window behind on in front of you. Depending on the window positions, you may find you have access to these windows without moving from your seat. This can also be handy in getting a better position with the sun or for getting a view of something that you’ve already passed.
3. Try positioning the camera to whatever part of the window is clearest. If you have a compact digital camera that has a swivel display (like the Canon G3), this makes the job much easier. It can also enable you to get a better view of the ground.
4. The best time to take a shot of the ground is when the plane is turning on your side. Generally this occurs after takeoff and preparing to land.
5. Post process the images to remove scratches and improve the colour/contrast. Most plane windows play havoc with automatic settings on most cameras, so pretty much all shots can be improved with a bit of basic editing.

The following image taken from a plane over the South Island of New Zealand is straight out of the camera (with exposure compensation set to a third of a stop under).

Here’s the same image with some Photoshop work. Using auto levels was sufficient to remove most of the murk. Some of the smears and scratches (I didn’t have the time or energy to completely remove all of them) were removed using the healing tool.

With 2 weeks of very cold overnight temperatures and daytime temperatures just getting above zero in the late afternoon, it has given some wonderful opportunities for taking photos of ice and frost.

When taking images of ice, it can sometimes be a little tricky for auto-focus to work correctly if the ice is very shiny and/or transparent. In these instances, either using manual focus or trying to focus on something solid on the ice surface (like a rock or stick) can help.

The colour of the ice can also change a bit depending on the type of light and exposure. Typically any images of white objects taken on auto-exposure mode will come out slightly grey. It’s usually best to set the exposure manually, or use exposure compensation.

Occasionally, I will use the colour balance control in PS to add more blue if I’m going for that icy cold feel. There’s a lot of flexibility with the colours when it comes to ice, as it generally picks up the colours that are reflected on it, so there’s no hard and fast rule.

Here’s a selection of some of the ice images taken in the last couple of weeks.

Ice Squiggles

Ice Bubbles

Ice Crystals

All Iced Up and Nowhere To Go

The skies in New Zealand usually have an intense blue colour. This is particularly the case in Autumn, Spring and Winter.

My lunchtime break has provided a interesting time to experiment with holding various objects up to the sky, while holding my camera (Canon G3) in the other hand and taking the photo on the macro setting. The trick is to hold the object as low as possible and hold as high as possible over the head.

I’ve found the best combinations are simple blocks of colours that either contrast or compliment the sky.

Here’s a collection of the images that I’ve taken using this technique.

The Alien With 100 Nipples

Very Appealing

Blue Days

Blue Sky Brushing

I was recently made aware of redbubble which is an Australian based site that has similar features to Flickr, but is geared around selling your photographic images and artworks.

The printing options from cards to full sized canvas prints look really good and the reviews I’ve seen all say the quality is very good.

I’ll post some more details at a later stage once I’ve been using the site for a while.

My redbubble page is at http://www.redbubble.com/people/peternz/

My Sunday photographic shoot turned out to be a very foggy day, however, this provided some excellent opportunities for moody shots on the fringes of the fog. Looking down into the valleys covered in their bed of fog is always an inviting view.

I took quite a number of shots overlooking Queenstown, Arrowtown, the Gibbston Valley and Wanaka, but I think the best opportunities arose when I headed out to Lake Hawea near Wanaka. Looking towards the north west end of the lake, the sun and the dark clouds had some fantastic light.

I used the Canon 300D with the 300mm zoom lens at 130mm. To prevent the detail of the cloud from being lost, I metered off the top portion of the sky.

The original image was already pretty much a monochrome shot (with a blue tinge).

Original, unedited version

I thought it might look better as a pure black and white image, so I just desaturated the colour in Photoshop and burnt the clouds in a little to bring out the detail.

Black & White, edited version

The Canon G3 like most compact digital cameras has a panorama feature which allows you to align the next shot in the sequence with part of the previous image.

Ideally, you’d want to use a tripod to ensure the most accurate results, but good results can still be achieved with hand held shots. Obviously, the more images that make up the panorama, the greater the likelihood of getting the alignment out, but with a steady hand good results can still be achieved with five or more images.

The following image is a hand held eight stitch shot. It was very cold and windy, so it was hard to get really good alignment, but the Canon Photostitch software really does a very good job at matching the join points. However, the join points are still quite obvious when you view the large version, particularly the far right hand image.

Another factor that is sometimes hard to control (particularly on wide panoramas) is the difference in exposures due to the angle of the sun. The best way to compact this is to manually adjust the light levels of the individual images. In the above image I was a bit lazy as I really should have adjusted the last image on the right, but as the shot was more to record the snow conditions, I wasn’t too bothered by it.

Generally, I take both my Canon G3 and Canon 300D cameras with me on photographic shoots. I often use the G3 for quick shots like taking a photo of an information sign so that I view the details of the area I’ve been. With the 300D being a larger camera, I usually reserve it for shots that I feel are going to be worth it.

However, there are a number of occasions where I’ll take very similar shots on both cameras. The reasons for this are sometimes a little vague, but can include a slight feeling of paranoia that I better get a shot on both cameras in case one of the cameras or cards fail, or just curiosity as to how each camera will capture the scene.

The following two images are taken from the same location with as close to the field of view that is possible between the 300D and G3. As I have the G3 set to vivid colour mode and the fact that the 300D tends to take slightly under-saturated images, I have adjusted the 300D version of the image in Photoshop to be reasonably close to the G3 colours. This involved adding a bit more yellow and red in the colour balance control and pumping up the saturation a little in the Hue/Saturation tool.

You’ll probably see that in the 300D version, the bush in the foreground is quite soft. That’s mostly my fault for not adjusting the focus point to closer to the foreground.

I love some of the speckled skies that quite often occur around here. In autumn and winter, then sun is generally in a favourable position to highlight the textures. One thing I like doing to bring out the texture in the cloud is to turn it into a sepia image.

Here’s the original image, which is quite nice, but perhaps a little plain/boring.

Original, untouched version

To turn into a sepia image in Photoshop, I first used the quick/lazy way of converting to sepia by using the Hue/Saturation control and moving the hue slider all the way to the left. This technique works quite well on image like this that are already mostly monochrome, otherwise you end up with a whole bunch of garish colours. I then darkened the sky a little with the curves adjustment and used the burn tool to dark and bring out a little more detail in a couple of the areas where the cloud was a little burnt out.

Sepia version

It’s been very cold and frost in the last few days, and when I brought the wheelie bin in, I noticed how the frost crystals had formed around the raised letters on the lid. The bin was sitting in the sun and the ice crystals were really sparkling, so I hurried in to grab the 300D and put on the macro lens.

Given the urgency in getting a shot, I was a bit lazy and didn’t use a tripod. It can be quite tricky taking hand held macro shots as the focal point is continually changing. I have a 100mm Tokina macro lens which is reasonably fast at auto focusing, so I was able to get a couple of shots where the focal point was where I was aiming (more or less).

The image below has been given a slight blue tint in Photoshop as I usually think the colour blue when I think of ice.

Today dawned as a crisp blue day. I was tossing up between heading out to Glenorchy where there was possibly some good new snow (most of the recent snow missed the Queenstown area), or heading out to Blue Lake at St Bathans. In the end, St Bathans won out as it was a very still day and I hoped to get lots of good reflections on Blue Lake.

St Bathans is very rustic old gold town. It’s situated beside the beautiful Blue Lake (created by the sluicing and channelling of the gold diggers), the intense blue colour of the lake is caused by the mineral content of the surrounding cliffs.

St Bathans

When I first arrived, I hurried to the shore edge to see what type of reflection images I could get. To my annoyance, there were two very noisy dogs swimming in the lake (it would have been freezing) with their owners throwing in sticks. Needless to say, this didn’t exactly help for a calm, still water to get perfect mirrored reflections on. Undeterred, I headed further down the lake to where it was quieter and calmer. The mud was very sticky and made walking around the track a little tricky. The landscape is quite alien and moon like.

After taking well over one hundred photos around the lake, I headed off to do a loop on the Hawkdun Runs and Home Hills Run roads which take you right into the heart of the Hawkdun Conservation area. I was a little worried about the state of the road given the recent snows, but luckily, there had been enough sun to melt most of the snow on the road, with just a few patches remaining in the shaded areas. It’s an extremely beautiful area in the classic starkness of the Maniototo region.

Hawkdun Ranges

On the way back home to Arrowtown, I managed to get a few shots of the beautiful old buildings in Ophir and one of the vineyards in the Gibbston Valley before the sun went behind the mountains.

In total, I took 290 shots on both cameras (Canon G3 and 300D). All in all, a very satisfying day.