Photographing from Commercial Airplanes

This week's column by Ctein

Lately I've been having considerable success making portfolio-worthy photographs on my airline flights. I may not have any artistic control over the scenery I'm presented, but despite that, I'd have to say that nearly half my flights have produced at least one photograph I'm happy to add to my portfolio. I engaged in such photography back in my film/darkroom days but I rarely achieved success. These days I consider success the norm. So, what's different?

Where you sit
One change has nothing to do with the photographic technology. I'm sitting further forward in the airplane. There is less air turbulence in front of the wing than behind; the closer you can get to the nose, the better. The reason I'm sitting further forward is that the combined forces of rampant security paranoia and rampant airline greed have made economy-class flying increasingly intolerable to me. Most of my five to eight peregrinations each year are by air rather than ground. I like to go places. Increasingly, I'm disliking getting there.

Consequently, these days, I'm weighting my flight choices more heavily by whether I can get a cheap first class upgrade or choice of premium quality seats than by flight times and arrivals. I'll also throw frequent-flier miles and credit card points at an upgrade; it usually gets me more value both financially and comfort-wise than a free coach ticket would. I'm nowhere near the income level where I can afford to pay list for business or first class, but cheap upgrades? Oh, yeah!

Paradoxically, looking to the "discount" airlines often produces better results. Living on the West Coast and mostly traveling to the Midwest, I've got some good options. Southwest Airlines often has the lowest prices to where I want to go, when you take into account that they still allow two free pieces of checked luggage. Paying an additional sum for priority boarding (and buying and checking-in early) usually means I can grab whatever seat I want.

My favoritest airline, though, is Minneapolis-based Sun Country (half my trips are to Minneapolis). They fly direct to San Francisco, unlike Southwest. Not only are their fares low, but when I do my 24-hour online check-in, they'll allow me to upgrade to first class (which is never sold out) for $120 each way. For an average of $150–$200 more than I'd pay for a coach ticket on some other airline, I fly first class. If I want to take any checked bags with me, which I often do, knock $50–$100 off of that modest premium.

That's the nontechnological angle. Mostly, my success rate is way up because of both digital photography and digital printing. Digital cameras let me find the sweet spots in the airplane windows. Photographing through two panes of acrylic/glass doesn't degrade image quality anywhere as much as you'd think, unless you're photographing through a ripply spot in one of the panes or it's really badly scraped up. In the film days, I wouldn't know if I had picked a good spot until I developed the film. More often than not I hadn't.

Now what I do is make a test photograph and chimp it like mad at high magnification. I go over the entire frame to see if there are any sour spots in it. If there are, I move the camera over a bit and try again. Usually I can find a usable spot on the window. As long as I always photograph through that spot, photographs look consistently sharp from corner to corner.

Fig. 2.

Working with a longer lens also helps. Wider fields of view pull in more oblique rays and those cause more problems when photographing through two layers of window. I stick with something in the 75-100mm-equivalent range. The illustration at the top of this post shows the full frame of a recent addition to my portfolio that I made with the Olympus 45mm (90 mm-e) lens. It makes a critically tack-sharp 17x22-inch print. Figure 2 is a 100%-scale detail.

Color-crossover
Digital printing comes into play because aerial photography means photographing through a very long column of air. There's a huge amount of atmospheric scattering, and shorter wavelengths are scattered much more strongly than longer ones. That's what produces the blue shadows in long-distance photographs: green and especially blue wavelengths from all over the scene are scattered into the shadows, veiling them. It's not just a color shift, it's color-crossover. Even when you've overall color-balanced so that the whites are neutral, the shadows will be greenish-blue.

This was a nearly-impossible problem to address in the darkroom unless you did dye transfer, in which case it was merely annoyingly difficult. In image-processing software, it's readily addressed with a curves correction. Figure 3 shows a generic curve adjustment for dealing with this. Observe how far in I pulled the black point on the blue curve, a lesser amount on the green curve, and only a little bit on the red curve. I added control points up near 192, 192 so that the whites and highlights are little altered. This is just an approximation of what you'd need to do for any particular photograph, but it shows you the general idea.

Aerial B&W infrared photography is also turning out to be a big win. That'll be next week's column.

Ctein

Ctein's column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David: "Great post. I am an airline pilot and I have taken a DSLR along on every trip I've worked since 2004. Your tips are spot on, especially the part about finding a good piece of window to shot through. Even the flight-deck's windows have their flaws. It's important to find a spot with no ripples.

"The only point where I disagree with you is the use of long lenses. Yes, long lenses help you stay clear of some of the issues associated with shooting through a window, but when I use a long lens for aerials I feel like I am not able to produce a sense of height and my pictures look flat. I advise you to pull out the wide angle and deal with the consequences. You can mitigate a lot of the flare and reflection issues by pushing your lens hood right up against the window or carry a piece of black cloth to drape around your camera.

"Your curves solution to blue shadows is quite elegant. I'm going to add it to my bag of tricks. For those who are interested, I created a video tutorial on how to edit photos taken through an airliner's window. It's kind of rambling and poorly produced but I do give away many of my secrets so it might be worth watching.

"A big part of getting good photos from an airliner is being in the right place at the right time. The same rules of lighting apply to aerial photography as landscape photography. Plan your trip so you are airborne during early morning or late afternoon. My job keeps me airborne 700 to 1,000 hours per year, so my odds of seeing something spectacular are higher than the average air traveler. Here is a gallery of some of the best aerial photos I've acquired over the years.

"For more tips about aerial photography and lots of stories, see my 'Flying the Line' series at my blog.

"Sorry for the shameless self promotion.  Sometimes I can't help myself."

Dale: "Enjoyed the column very much. Another thing to consider is using the airline website to find out what equipment is being used. Newer planes tend to mean fewer scratched windows. And as a 40 week per year flyer, I can say Southwest seems to maintain windows more often. They often seem clearer."

VK: "One of my favorite landscape subjects! And technically it is much harder than people think it is when seeing the final product, because the list of things you have to worry about is huge: sun glare, far distance haze, clouds, scratches on the window, exhaust turbulence from the engines, and that your ground speed is 3 meters per 1/60 sec. Not to mention people in the aisle seat who insist in sleeping with windows down.

"Absolutely the best airline route for such photography is British Airways Flight 118. Leaves Bangalore, India, in the early a.m., and lands in London, UK, shortly after noon, and flies over some stunning places along the way."

Eli Burakian: "Folks should check out Julieanne Kost who has a great book called Window Seat with incredible photographs from commercial flights, as well as specific and general advice."

Comments

[TBannor]

Ive taken some interesting photos from airliners. Thanks for the color curve tip. Also, on any aircraft with wing mounted engines, sitting in front of the wing is important also because the the shimmer from the hot exhaust ruins most shots from behind the wing. It's visible as a fuzzy strip through a portion of the photo.

Its also fun to use Google Maps to locate shots in remote parts of the country.

[Pak-Ming Wan]

I've always wondered how to do that color adjustment easily... thanks for this post!

Pak

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Very nice images, Ctein.

I, too, have enjoyed occasionally shooting from plane windows. My own interest is finding scenes that prod the imagination beyond the familiarity of simple aerial landscape scenes toward conceptual abstraction, if only for a moment. To that end I look for areas where there is a sharp change in terrain or some other anomalous feature. Here's a series from a flight east from San Francisco (captured with a Canon S95).

Yes, post-processing can be challenging depending on the atmospheric and window conditions.

Echoing Paul Caponigro's remarks about Minor White, some of the magic of photography is to "...photograph not only for what things are but for what else they are".

[Adrian]

My favorite kind of in-flight entertainment :) Unless there's cloud cover I'm usually glued to the window for the whole flight. I prefer my coach window seat over getting an aisle upgrade.

[Sarge]

So that's why coral atolls or reef-fringed islands look spectacular from 30,000 feet. All those shades of aquamarine and blue which I can't reproduce at sea level. Color-
crossover. Thanks for the edification, Ctein!

Being seated up front also gets the plane's wing out of the way. In an all-coach domestic flight, I always ask for a single-digit window seat if I check-in early enough.

I haven't had much success with in-flight night shots without image stabilization, or even using a camera with non-stellar IS (I don't own an E-M5). Is there a workaround for shooting at slow shutter speed, hand-held, aboard a vibrating airplane? Would using a rubber lens shade held against a plane's window work?

(Meanwhile, I've settled for trailing runway lights caught at slow shutter speeds on an unsteady and fast-moving platform like this one).

P.S. TOP reader and commercial airline pilot David Raboin has compiled a unique portfolio of in-flight shots taken from the best seat aboard. As a loyal Sun Country flyer, maybe you can get an invite to the flight deck to shoot through the plane's expansive windshield.

[Andrew]

I love photographing while flying. I process in B&W to abstract the views. I even cheat and photograph at takeoff and landing!

My recent favorite topic is photographing California's Central Valley and the abstract patterns of the crop fields.

[John Camp]

Ctein, do you experience problems with vibration from the the plane? What minimum shutter speed do you use?

[Another Phil]

Hi Ctein,
If you've not seen it before this went viral, shuttle Endeavour from a plane window;
http://twitpic.com/4yg6hs
best wishes phil

[Chuck Albertson]

Last week, during a morning flight down to Portland, the pilot decided to scrub off some time by dropping down and doing a fly-by of the Mt. St. Helens crater. The lighting was perfect -- and my window seat was on the other side of the plane!

[Mike Anderson]

Excellent advice. I think I will start spending the extra to get a seat close to the front. I've missed so many shots because of those wings. Pilots are so self centered they always refuse to roll the plane a mere 30 degrees to get the wing out of my shot.

[Ed Kirkpatrick]

So I guess now I can write off a first class ticket as a business expense? Yay!

[John Robison]

Oh yeah! The 'cattle car' experience has just about killed any desire to get there fast for me. My wife and I are seriously considering a bus for our next 5K mile round trip to visit family. Ride time is 2.5 days each way but....no 1 hour drive to the airport, get there 2 hours early, remove your shoes, stuff my 6'3" frame into a seat that would be embarrassed to be the back seat of an old Karmenn Ghia. Wonder what I could shoot through the window of a Greyhound?

[TheBrummell]

I'll be going on a trip in a little more than a week, and I'm hoping to put some of this advice to work on the flights.

Lightroom 3.6 doesn't have colour curves, and I'm too poor and distracted to buy/subscribe to Photoshop - not to mention the upgrade in computer power I'd need. However, the GIMP has it, and a quick bit of fiddling with a shot from earlier this year shows your curves trick is very effective!

Thanks for this, and I'm looking forward to next week's B&W edition.

Also, David, thanks for the shameless self-promotion - more advice is welcome!

[Peter Szawlowski]

You might like these:
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/10/21/abstract-flightscapes/

[Tony Ayling]

Great to hear there are others who like to take photographs from commercial flights. I've been doing it for several years. The biggest tip I have is to plan which side of the plane to sit on. Make sure your window will be on the shaded side of the plane otherwise the sun reflecting on the window ruins most shots. I know it is normally frowned on by proper photographers but I find that auto levels in Photoshop CS5 or earlier works amazingly on some aerials to remove haze and bring up the colours with minimal effort. I'll certainly be trying your more proper processing tip! Some of my flights over the more remote and arid parts of Australia, where i live, have produced some memorable and almost unbelievable images.

[Tony Ayling]

I forgot to add that I also spend many happy and interesting hours locating the exact location of each photograph using Google Earth!

[Joseph Reeves]

The science I've been looking for, thanks. I travel a lot throughout Alaska for my work. For years I sat on the isle for the leg room and to be off the plane or jet as soon as possible. Then I bought a Panasonic GF1 and switched to the window seats.
In the off season I get to sit up front-- 2A or 2F, otherwise its the exit row. I've learned to pick starboard on the way north out of Juneau and port on the way home. I will take the "milk run" flight in the late afternoon if the weather is decent just so I can photograph the Chugach Mountains and Coast Range in fading light. It has made flying fun again. A sample of my From Up Above set http://www.flickr.com/photos/umnak/sets/72157632207247621/with/9456111760/

[Maggie Osterberg]

One of the things I like to photograph when I'm on an airliner are the "landscapes" you can't see from the ground.

[Bart Willowdale]

Dirty scratched windows are a big problem for me, accentuated in my case by my preference for shooting as wide as I can.
In the past year or so I have found it more satisfying and challenging to
take aerial videos

[ctein]

Dear VK,

Your post brought to mind a great mental image. In American, we talk about having the shade down to darken a window. Having the window down is what we'd do in an automobile, to let in fresh air.

I do understand that many people sleep better with fresh air entering the room, and I imagine they get quite a bit of it at 10,000 meters up and 800 km/hour.

~~~~~~

Dear Richard,

I imagine the seats are more comfortable, and the food likely better, too.

~~~~~~

Dear John,

Plane vibration doesn't seem to be a problem, but I'm never pressing the camera against the window. If I'm bracing against the window or fuselage, it's my arms that are in contact, and the high frequency stuff just doesn't propagate.

More of a problem is that the plane is constantly making adjustments in attitude and orientation, so the scene is never truly still (not even counting the forward velocity). For that reason, I find that it's sometimes hard to get a tack-sharp photo at even 1/100th second with the 45mm lens, and below that the odds drop off considerably. Maybe 1 in 10 is sharp at a 30th of a second. I try to stay at 1/150th and above, and I'm not really relaxed about it until I'm at 1/250th sec.

pax / Ctein
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com
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[Daniel S.]

In the interest of non-discrimination, how about making a column on photographing from cheap buses next? removing spots from the dirty windows, using IS to compensate for poor suspension, etc.

Alright, I half-jest, but it is true I've never flown anywhere nor I have any expectations to in the near future, so this discussion feels particularly alien to me. I wonder how that affects my perception of all your photos? they all feel rather close to abstract photography, but I don't know whether that was the intention, as with Kenneth above, or my inexperience with the subject plays a part in it as well.

[ctein]

Dear Tony,

Hah! I knew I left something out. Right-- sunlight shining on the window you're trying to photograph through is a guaranteed killer. Multiple internal reflections between the panes, plus the myriad scratches and pits produce overwhelming flare.

Thanks for the catch.

~~~~~~

Dear Sarge,

Photographing at night from an airplane is an uphill battle. Vibration isn't your big problem, so long as you don't press the camera directly to the window, and there's no reason to. But, there's a whole bunch else that can go wrong.

Unless the cabin lights are completely off, you'll need to throw a dark cloth over you and the camera to keep out stray light from bouncing between the panes and into your camera.

This is an inherently demanding subject, if what you're trying to photograph is the lights of towns, cities and airports. You've got a zillion pinpoint sources in your scene, and the least bit of camera motion will be very evident in the photograph. Which makes using low shutter speeds (see my earlier comment to John Camp) even more difficult.

Finally, you're in motion! In low altitude, low speed flight, you're still moving a meter in 1/30th of a second. At cruising speed, it's more like 3 meters every 30th of a second. Put another way, if you can resolve an automobile in your photograph, you're going to see trailing in those lights at that low a shutter speed. You can try panning with the scene and trust to luck.

I have photographed at night out the window of a plane. I *might* have one photograph worth showing from the attempts, and it's probably not portfolio-worthy, even when working at ISO 2000-3000.

It's just plain difficult, is what it is.

pax / Ctein
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com
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[Frank]

Dirty scratched up windows can add a lot of character and shooting film in a manual camera allows you to comply with the "no electronics" rule during take offs and landings.
http://frankpetronio.com/Flying/1/

[Andre Moreau]

Ctein,

Spot on with the comments on the economy class. The Wall Street Journal had an article about it recently.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/economy-shoulders-the-burden/story-fnay3ubk-1226746240525#mm-premium

[Jonathan]

"Would using a rubber lens shade held against a plane's window work?"

Nope. Tried it. The window has two layers and the lens shade does nothing for reflections from the inside surface of the outer layer. A black cloth as suggested by others might work better.

Also, it's always a good idea to reserve your seat on the side that's away from the sun.

The ticket for lightning-illuminated clouds at night is high ISO, a fast lens and make a lot of exposures. If you're lucky you'll get a few keepers.

A few of my favorites:

White Castle

Clouds at Sunrise

Hazy Landscape

Shiprock

[Sarge]

[P]lan which side of the plane to sit on.

Just remember that the letters assigned to plane seats read from left to right from the the front of the plane facing the tail-end. (At least on an A320 or a 737; don't remember that of wide-bodies.)

I once found myself seated on the wrong side of a plane because I thought its LH-RH orientation is the same as a car's. It's the opposite!

Thank you, Ctein and TOP commenters for the science and practical tips!

[Sarge]

The LH-RH orientation of a plane is the same as a car's. My bad.

Sorry, Mike