Flying With a Camera (Part II)

Guest post by David Raboin

Part I is here

Long Shadows Cast on the Great Basin… The primary challenge of editing photos taken from an airliner is correcting the contrast. Straight out of the camera my aerial photos are flat with all the vital information packed into a small hump in the middle of the histogram. My usual editing process starts with two steep curve adjustments layers, one layer for color and another for luminosity adjustments. On top of those layers I sometimes need to do multiple local adjustments using luminosity masks, gradient masks, or soft edged brushes. I consider the above photo a triumph of my process. For years I struggled to create accurate shadows in my aerial photos. Then, on an uneventful flight last spring, while looking down on the shadows of houses in the Los Angeles suburbs in late afternoon, I got to thinking about how shadows look from the air: they’re dark, low contrast on the inside, and sharp edged. How do you lower contrast and at the same time darken in photoshop? Decrease the pitch of a curve! I cracked it. Now, to darken shadows without exaggerating the contrast throughout the entire image, I use a curves adjustment layer with a luminosity mask to isolate the darkest tones. Then, I pull the upper right curve’s anchor point straight down until the shadows are suitably dark. It’s a simple,noise-free solution and I think it looks great.      

Without making a conscious decision, my dissatisfaction with that first online gallery set me on a path to becoming a serious photographer. Within a few years I was carrying a bag full of DSLR kit on every trip. My home library swelled with Photoshop manuals. And, most importantly, I became fascinated with photography as an art. I devoured all things photo related: books on composition, photography history, photo blogs, and endless image browsing on the web. By 2006, three years into photography, I was beginning to feel confident in my growing skills. I could capture the glow of sunset on a wall of thunderstorms and correct the contrast in a photo that peered through six miles of hazy atmosphere.

Thunderstorm Over Nebraska and the North Platte River The biggest challenge when composing aerial photos is portraying the sky’s volume. Airliners cruise roughly six miles above the earth and it’s difficult to impart that depth in a two dimensional image. Often I find myself flying near a massive thunderstorm, some of them reaching 50,000 feet, taller than two Mount Everests or six El Capitans; but, without a visual size reference in the frame, the size of the storm is lost in a photo. While dodging some heavy weather on our way from Chicago to San Francisco a couple of summers ago, I was fortunate to get a chance to photograph this monster cell floating above the Platte River Valley in Nebraska. The backlighting makes the storm look suitably dark (severe thunderstorms are puffy white billows when viewed from the sunny side) and, the North Platte River sparkles for a hundred miles towards the horizon. I couldn’t have planned this, it’s too perfect. Finally, a photo that shows the true size of a thunderstorm.     

Today, my bag is packed with a Canon 5D Mark III and an assortment of Canon lenses, both zoom and prime. I travel half a million miles every year. My job is flying planes, so I don’t have time to baby my gear. My camera bag gets bashed through security, crunched into overhead bins, rained on, and left unguarded in public places for long periods. Over the years I’ve only had one major mishap. Once, after a particularly difficult trip, I drove out of the airport parking lot with my camera bag still on top of my car. That’s one way to justify an equipment upgrade, and I love to upgrade....

Over the decade that I’ve been flying with a camera, technological improvements in both cameras and post processing software have made previously impossible shots ordinary. Now days, with improved high ISO performance, I can take aerial photos of city lights at dusk while also preserving the details of the landscape and sky, something I wouldn’t have dreamed of in 2010. I imagine that not too far in the future I’ll be able to photograph noise-free moonlight on cloud tops while screaming along at Mach .78.

Moonlight Ride Above Denver Taken with my Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 16–35mm image-stabilized lens, this photo pushes the limits of current technology. I used ISO 8000 at ⅛th second and ƒ/4. There’s a little more noise than I’d like in this photo and the lights of Denver aren’t as sharp they could be, but we’re getting there. I’m excited for the future of night photography. (Full disclosure: this image falls into Mike’s new “Photo Art” category due to some heavy Content Aware Fill to remove reflections from the windshield)

Although it took a lot longer to get here than I’d originally planned, my career (thanks to low oil prices and industry consolidation) is now that of a gentleman aviator. I’m fortunate to fly beautiful modern jets between America’s major cities, stay in posh downtown hotels, and live the life of a flaneur and street photographer during my overnights. I hesitate before complaining. However, any job that requires strict adherence to procedure can become brutally routine. A sense of loneliness creeps in while spending half the month flying around with strangers, and doing a job that, when done right, leaves no trace and little memory. The camera helps turn that around. With a camera, airline flying becomes a scenic cruise, an adventure, a story waiting to be told. As we track down the lonely corridors of vapor, I’m looking for something beautiful that I can share when I get back down to earth.

My Current Ride: Airbus 320 Getting ready to push back from the gate at San Francisco International Airport

To see a collection of my best flying images please visit my website: www.photos4u2c.com

You can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook.

Dave

Note: All photos were taken in accordance with federal aviation regulations and company policies. Safety of flight is every pilot’s primary concern and the camera only comes out in low workload situations.  

Words and images ©2016 by David Raboin, all rights reserved

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

Warren Jones: "Wow, Dave, nicely done sir. Thank you for sharing your images and story with us. I very much enjoyed it."

Dave Van de Mark: "I have thoroughly enjoyed this guest post. Would love to see a more detailed view of the processing carried out for the some of the photos. As a 'ground' landscape photographer, rendering the proper degree of contrast relative to other (tonal and color) variables in pursuit of a satisfying and realistic print, is the hardest thing I typically encounter. And rarely have I been totally satisfied. And as David demonstrates so clearly with his stunning photos, that journey has been challenging, but with new possibilities always appearing on the horizon (pun intended). It's the same story for me and I'm sure glad he shared his. Thanks to you Mike for this guest post."

Comments

[Jack]

I appreciated your processing discussion. Do you use the dehaze slider much?

[Herman]

My experience with aerial photography was limited to the time when I was in the U.S. Army Air Corps during WWII. And then we had to make rather dull looking collages of aerial maps.

[Nicholas B]

Dave - as always, beautiful images and, I must emphasise, great writing! You must give yourself more credit :-) Cheers

[Joe B]

Did you fly under, through, or climb over that thunderstorm in Nebraska? Hold on....

[John Krumm]

I really enjoyed both segments, and all the samples. Your enthusiasm is catching and now I want to try getting better shadows with my regular photos. Your low-pitch curve sounds interesting just as a way to get more subtle shadows with detail.

[MarkB]

I love David's photos of the clouds and sky and our earth way down below, I think because I'm stuck on this side of the atmosphere. So, is anyone interested in printing a couple of these up for (another) TOP print offer?

[Andy Kochanowski]

Many thanks for posting David's thoughts and experiences. Fascinating to a landlubber. As a very frequent business flyer, it has never dawned on me that the white-shirt guys in the cockpit could also be having fun with serious photography.

Hats off: https://pleasurephoto.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/photo-william-eggleston-drink-airplane/

[Steve]

WOW!!! The second one (Thunderstorm over Nebraska) is just fantastic!!! The composition is stunning.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Your images are magnificent, David. Nice compositions and good choices of moments! I do not envy your job but I certainly envy some of the scenes you witness from your office. Mike ought to hold a print sale of a couple of your images before Christmas. (Really, Mike.)

More substantially, however, your spirit of photography is excellent. The simple, sheer joy of just seeing is a sometimes-forgotten backbone of excellence in the medium.

[Merle]

Wonderful! Thanks for writing! I never thought of your job as: "doing a job that, when done right, leaves no trace and little memory" but it is so true. More of us should aspire to the same in our jobs (and lives, for that matter!)

[Matthew Allen]

Really enjoyed these two posts. Thanks for sharing your experience David.

[David Raboin]

Thanks again for all the nice comments everyone. I checked the links to your portfolios and you all take amazing pics. That's why I love TOP so much, great photographers having a thoughtful conversation. Maybe I can come up with another post someday?

Also, I need to thank Mike for his professional editing. I wish there was a Mike App that would automatically edit my every internet utterance. He found all the rough spots and sanded them flat.

And now to answer your questions...

Jack, I experimented with Lightroom's dehaze slider but I never found it useful on my aerial photos. I have used dehaze a few times in my other photography, but only locally to increase the contrast and sharpness in one small area. For me, Dehaze does too much stuff at once. It sharpens, adds contrast, and saturation. I like sliders that only do one thing at a time, that way I know what is going on. That's also why I often do two curves adjustments in Photoshop, one with the blend mode set to color, and the other with the blend set to luminosity. Aerial photos sometimes need extreme adjustments so I want to make sure nothing is going sideways.

Joe B, we went around those storms in Nebraska. The Airbus can only get up to 39,000 feet which wasn't high enough to get above those giant Nebraska storm cells. Over the central plains there isn't much air traffic so deviating around the high cloud tops is pretty easy. We ask Air Traffic Control for a heading change and they grant it.

[Jock Elliott]

Any photographer who can out himself as a flaneur and capture such marvelous images of "the greatest show off earth" has got my vote.

Well done!

[Gary]

I really enjoyed the two posts. I forwarded them to a friend who is a commercial pilot and he was wowed. My friend said he would like to know more about Mr.Raboin's post-processing. I told him it's a slippery slope...

By the way, the images of family on Mr. Raboin's website are exceptional.

Thank you,Mike, for featuring this talented photographer.