Everyone fortunate enough to have a window seat during a flight knows first-hand how beautiful the world can look from the skies. However, photographers also know how hard it is to actually get good photos from a plane, especially a commercial flight, even if the views are spectacular.
Australian photographer Ben Neale built an inflatable boat-plane to capture incredible aerial photos of remote areas of the Solomon Islands and the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia.
A passenger flight was forced to make an emergency landing in NYC this weekend after a woman mistook a fellow passenger's vintage camera for a bomb. The suspected terrorist was pinned to the tarmac before authorities figured out he was a camera enthusiast.
Andy here, checking in from cloudy and chilly London. Here for work for a week or so but had a pretty epic flight over, as you’ll see in a second. I had a few friends with systemwide upgrades expiring on American Airlines soon and they were generous enough to upgrade me to business class for the flight over.
Photographer Pierre T. Lambert got very lucky on a flight from Chicago to Seoul, South Korea recently. While flying near the arctic circle, he decided to just... try taking a photo out of his airplane window. To his surprise, his camera captured the glowing Aurora Borealis that was invisible to the naked eye.
Here's one last PSA for any photographer using a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro made between September 2015 and February 2017: if you haven't checked your serial number to see if your battery has been recalled, do so ASAP. Not only are you putting yourself in danger, you might end up stranded in a foreign country, like British travel photographer Julian Elliott.
Everyone knows the classic images of Iceland. The famous Skogafoss, The Black Beach, The Blue Lagoon, you name it. On a recent trip to Iceland, we decided we wanted to shoot something a little bit different.
I think it's safe to say that the cat is out of the bag, the secret's been blown... there's a DC-3 plane wreck in Iceland.
Of the things that new camera technology has allowed us to do, filming the Aurora Borealis in real time has to be one of our favorites. Using the incredible Canon ME20F-SH, the folks at AURORA skycam TV were able to capture the northern lights in real time, handheld, while gliding along at 36,000 feet and 800 km/h.
When people say you should do "anything" to get the shot, getting decapitated or losing a hand might not be what they had in mind. But that's what one tourist almost did while trying to get a photo of a plane landing at the dangerous St. Bart's airport.
On May 31st, 2014, a small Cessna plane crashed in a field a few miles away from Denver, killing its pilot and passenger. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) just published a report with findings from its investigation, concluding that the crash was most likely caused by the pilot becoming disoriented while taking selfies of himself.
Photographer Joel Krahn has spent the last two years of his life putting his time and talents towards helping non-profits. And after two years of doing this work in his hometown of Vancouver, he was given the opportunity to take his endeavors overseas and shoot with On-Field Media, a media division of Nairobi-based organization Africa Inland Mission.
Over the course of the three months he was there, Krahn captured a gorgeous collection of aerial landscapes of the African environment -- from the Nile River weaving its way through South Sudan to rural villages in Kenya.
An Australian man learned earlier this year that just because you’ve disassembled your drone and packed it safely away in a number of Pelican cases, it doesn’t mean it can’t cause troubles when undeclared in the cargo bay of your international flight.
NASA is known for using some impressive optics for its telescopes. But with amazing optics come some logistical limitations.
Ground-based lenses used by NASA can be as massive as needed, but are limited due to atmospheric distortion. Those used in space-based telescopes such as Hubble, on the other hand, must be much smaller, capable of being launched into space and fixed on-the-fly. This leaves NASA with a little Catch–22.
A Catch-22 they’ve managed to find an answer to in the form of SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy): a Boeing 747 with a 17-ton telescope packed inside.
While the FAA is yet to receive the full legal authority over the regulation of drones or UAVs or quadcopters or whatever you want to call them, a recent incident involving a drone and commercial jet might just help them speed up the process to establishing legislation as to when and where these UAVs can fly.
In what is one of the more unique and well-executed uses of perspective photography I’ve ever seen, Instagrammer Varun Thota has combined his love for flight with his daily photo habits to create a unique series of images, aptly called #mytoyplane.
The kinds of stunts the rise of action cameras has allowed us to capture in POV are often scary, but more often than not they're also planned. However, for nine skydivers, the footage their helmet mounted GoPros captured recently wasn't planned in the least, and it will likely be the most terrifying thing you see all week... or month... or year.
When it comes to aerial photography, things are getting more and more complicated. Setting up a drone business in the US is getting to be a major headache in some states, and other options (e.g. paragliding) might just get you arrested if you fly over the wrong thing or take off from the wrong place.
AirCam is a solution, albeit an expensive one, that frees serious aerial photographers to do their thing -- and do it in style.
Photographer Edouard Janssens recently sent a weather balloon equipped with a Sony NEX-5 …
For his project "Cloud Collection", photographer Rüdiger Nehmzow went about four miles off the ground and photographed clouds through the open door of the plane. With no glass between Nehmzow and the sky to muddy up the shots, the resulting photographs are absolutely stunning.