ALWAYS ask for a window seat

Really? Well, that’s the advice from 500px:

You should always, ALWAYS ask for a window seat. Forget the trouble of not being able to get up to go to the bathroom, or the inability to stretch your legs.

Their argument is that you might just catch something as good as the 35 photos they share in their post. And look, those photos are good:

ws1

ws2Pragtig. Mooi. But the fact remains that there are around 100,000 commercial flights each day, and the 500px collators have managed to gather just 35 examples of amazing window seat photography (and don’t get me wrong, they are amazing).

There’s a problem with this. I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and assuming an average of 30 rows of seats per plane (seems reasonable, ne?), that’s 60 window seats per flight, meaning 6 million window seats per day. Even taking into account that not every flight will give the opportunity for amazing window seat photography (most routes bypass volcanoes altogether) and that not every amazing window seat photograph will be submitted to 500px, that’s not a great rate of return, is it? Because every window seat will definitely come with the trouble of not being able to get up to go to the bathroom, and the inability to stretch your legs.

So no, 500 px. I do appreciate the work of your contributors, but I’ll live the window seat dream vicariously through them while choosing to enjoy the (slightly) more comfortable leg room in my middle block aisle seat. (That’s a 6000 miles… tip right there.)

Volcano photos

More great photography from someone else. Previously, we have deduced that to take great landscape photos, you need to be in Iceland. Now we learn that to take great volcano photos, you need to be in Guatemala, more specifically 3600m up the side of Volcano Acatenango, overlooking Volcano Fuego, and you need to have your:

trusty (and well-loved) gaffer-taped Nikon Df hooked up to a 21mm Zeiss 2.8 and Gitzo 1542T tripod.

and also:

a Nikon 35mm 1.4, and an old Nikkor 55mm 1.2 in case [you] need something tighter.

Those old Nikkor 55mm 1.2’s eh? So much tighter.

I’m no expert on the field on photography, but I think that those are mainly camera things.
But the trivial details of what they are rapidly vanish when they produce stuff like this:

v2

And this:

v1Sorry for leaving them so very big. I think they need to be big.

These are the work of “photographer and traveler” Andy Shepard, and I think that they’re quite superb. If you want to learn more about how he got to take them, the full story is here on the 500px blog. (Does not include map of Guatemala.)

23 Landscape Photography Tips From A Pro

Incoming from 500px, the photography sharing site that my stuff really isn’t anywhere near good enough for: “23 Landscape Photography Tips From A Pro“, the Pro in question being Moldovan Iurie Belegurschi:

…whose own jaw-dropping landscapes never fails [sic] to amaze us.

Indeed, because yes, he’s pretty good:

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But the advice is less helpful – and yes, I’m being a bit cynical here, but aside from the motivational stuff (“Start with a vision”, “It’s not easy”, “Never stop learning” etc etc), it does seem it does seem to fall, basically, into three broad categories:

  1. Become a full-time photographer
  2. Move to Iceland, and
  3. Buy expensive equipment.

I’d wager that at least two, if not all three of those, are somewhat beyond the bounds of possibility for the majority of my readership.
That said, if you can do it (like Iurie did), then perhaps you too could produce stuff like this:

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Stunning. And do go and have a look at the rest of his stuff, if only because Iceland.

For the rest of us, it’s equally(?) beautiful Cape Town, with our flimsy tripods and our point-and-shoots. And the hope that one day we get especially lucky.

Photo credits: Iurie Belegurschi