Saturday, January 15, 2011

Photo Carousel #9: "Going Home"

Going Home

This is my ninth Photo Carousel entry, "Going Home".  If I do humbly say so myself, I really like this photo!  :-)

I took this out the window of a Singapore Airlines 747 on my way home from Germany to New York in March 2010.

We were flying straight into the sunset for a large part of this flight and I got some amazing photos out the window.  However, it was difficult to do it without getting reflections from the windows in the photos, especially when facing forward in my seat. 

So....I turned around to try to shoot backward and I saw this great shot.  The sky was perfect, I was able to get both engines in the photo while they were glowing in the sunset, and the ground is still visible in the dim light below.

Looking for a different vantage point from which to take photos (and some good luck with the light!) came together to make a cool photo!  

For this particular entry of Photo Carousel, I don't have a specific compositional or technical lesson that I'm communicating.  Instead, the point I want to make is a logistical one.  It's a lesson that I learned from one of my favorite photographers a long time ago, and even though it's somewhat common sensical, it really never occurred to me when taking photos.

The premise is simple:  As you're exploring a place or thing and spending time to photograph it, turn around in the opposite direction and explore further.  See if there are more photos to take of whatever you're photographing by simply changing your vantage point.

I can't even say the number of times I've done this and ended up with additional great photos that were taken in a location looking in the total opposite direction than I was originally looking.

During sunsets, at the beach, in the mountains, even at family parties.  Turn around and continue to look around.  You never know what you'll find!

2 comments:

  1. This is beautiful. It is peaceful yet powerful because of the jet engines. I like this carousel feature on your blog. I noticed that you linked this photo to your Flickr account. How did you do that?

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  2. Hi Beth,

    All you have to do is go to one of your pictures in Flickr, click the 'Share This' link at the top of the page, click the 'Grab HTML' link, and then paste that HTML into your blog page. Whala! The page will load the photo from Flickr and embed a link back to your Flickr photostream that it came from.

    Good luck!
    John

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