It's All About Light

With my busy travel schedule, I try to carry a camera whenever possible. Recently I realized (better late than never) that I actually have many opportunities for aerial photography too. I like windows seats (a little bit more space and some unique view opportunities) and not long ago I started experimenting with taking photos through an airplane window. It is still a learning curve, but throughout a couple of travels I realized a compact camera would not do for this task. Finally I settled on the - what I consider the best combo for taking photos from a commercial aircraft - the Nikon D5500 body coupled with the Nikkor AF-S 28-300mm (DX) lens. Considering the 1.5 crop factor of the DX body, the effective range is 42-450mm (which seems to be a perfect range for aerial photos shot through a small window). The D5500 is a phenomenal body, very capable and extremely small (for a DSLR): only 420g (0.93lb). A DSLR is much better at composing a shot in motion. I had tried many smaller long range zoom compacts before and could not accomplish any decent results with them (but of course your own mileage may vary...).

I also like experimenting with night time and panoramas. Speaking of panoramas - I've had good results with the Sony RX100 V, but recently have tried a more professional (but much heavier) setup that involves a panorama head. It seems the big panoramas (this one is a 650MB TIFF compressed down to a 90MB JPEG) pose a serious problem to almost all photo sharing sites. Google Photos failed uploading this file and other services compress it, losing all the effect of being able to immerse into the landscape. Easyzoom.com seems to be one of the few that are able to preserve the shot in its full glory.

I was also looking for a service that'd allow me to post some of those photos without too much clutter and noise. Finally decided to settle on the Tumblr: it offers good responsive templates, does custom URLs and also the mobile apps are not bad at all.

So here it is: my travel - photo - experiments, everlasting learning experience and work in progress. Enjoy: https://itsallaboutlight.slupik.com/. Subscribe if you like it. I plan on updating it whenever there is an opportunity.