Water reflections at 35,000 feet
Jim Zuckerman
On a flight last week I flew over the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri in the late afternoon, and I was intrigued by the sun’s reflection on the water. The angle of the sun was such that I could see the maximum intensity of the golden light, and the myriad fingers of the lake and the river system feeding it were defined in extreme contrast. It was a dazzling site. The graphic designs were fascinating, and they were constantly changing as the plane flew north. We were actually circumventing a storm system, so had the weather been good on our route I never would have seen this beautiful site. I grabbed my camera from the overhead bin and started shooting.
I hate photographing through the double panes of acrylic that make up airplane windows, but there was obviously no choice. To get the sharpest image, it’s necessary to shoot straight out of the window. If the lens is angled to even a small degree, the image quality is degraded significantly. I used a 200mm for this shot, which didn’t show any detail in the scratched surface of the window, but the double panes softened the image a bit just by virtue of the fact that this isn’t optically superior material. In Photoshop, I was able to sharpen it to compensate for this degradation and this worked quite well. In CS2 I used ‘smart sharpen’ which brought back the crispness of the image that would have been seen had I been able to open the window.
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