Capturing cityscapes "under glass"

Some of the best potential cityscapes a photographer can capture are “under glass.” Whether you're shooting from a hotel room, an observation tower, or an observation deck, the glass between you and the cityscape creates photographic problems when making your images.

From the highest observation deck in the world, on the Shanghai Tower's 126^th floor, to the One Liberty Place observation deck in Philadelphia on the 57^th floor, the spectacular views from most urban observation decks can only be seen and photographed through glass.

Shooting through glass is an important skill for travel photographers.

There are a few glassless locations from which to shoot wonderful cityscapes, such as the top deck on the “Top of the Rock” in New York City and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but most are glassed-in.

Dealing with glass reflections at observation decks is the main problem for photographers there. It comes from the deck's internal lighting, plus interior surfaces reflecting sunlight on to the glass. Additional problems can come from visitor restrictions and maintenance.

Tips to capturing aquarium images while traveling

There are amazing public aquariums for travelers to visit for hours of great enjoyment and learning. Some house more than 10,000 colorful and interesting wildlife species.

Photographers in public aquariums encounter a myriad of challenges; fish in constant motion, darkness, dirty glass walls, water which washes out even the brightest colors, and general bans on tripods, monopods and flash use.

Here's my public aquarium photography tips to assist in capturing great images from your visit:

Digital travel photography - Don't leave home without them!

My mom told me there were two essentials to pack for any trip.

Always take a toothbrush and toothpaste, as tooth decay doesn't vacation just because you do, and always pack clean underwear in perfect condition.

“What would foreigners think of Americans,” she would tell me, “if you got in an accident, were unconscious, and some strange nurse would undress you, only to see your underwear was full of holes?”

If my mom were alive today she might add, for those using digital cameras while traveling, to not leave home without extra memory cards, a spare battery and a way to recharge it.

Here's my list of ten digital photography gear items, in my mom's tradition of, “Never leaving home without them!”

Lenses for Travel Photography - Part VI (Special lenses and lens accessories)

This week in Part VI of my seven part series about lenses for travel photography, I discuss special lenses and lens accessories to consider when choosing lenses for travel. The series is primarily meant for SLR and DSLR camera users, who can attach a variety of lenses to their cameras to support their creativity, and suit the needs of their photographic opportunities.

It’s important to note there are many more lenses and lens accessories available for your consideration than I will discuss below, but the ones I have chosen have utility during travel, and are carried by some travelers, according to their needs.

Three lenses possible lenses for travelers include: fisheye, perspective control, and teleconverter.

Photographing Water: Reflections and the Deep Blue Sea

Many travelers think the secret to successful reflective water photographs is pure luck, nothing more. Of course, you already know, if for no other reason than I’m writing this article, that it’s not true. Then again, for the traveler, luck does play a part in making successful water photographs, but you can make your luck to an extent.

A significant problem for travelers wanting to make great water photographs is the serious time constraint in which we often find ourselves. Sometimes you can’t possibly schedule yourself at a particular location at a particular time. Sometimes when we’re at a great place for a photograph, the weather, wind or rain, for example, won’t allow us to create the photograph we’ve been looking forward to making. And sometimes despite our best efforts we just never get a chance to return to a great location a second time.

Photographing from boats and ships

I don't know about you, but I like cruising. I've been on large ships and small. I also enjoy canoeing and rafting. Taking photographs from any of these craft can be a real challenge.

Viewpoints can be highly limited. On a ship you may be far above the water's surface. In a zodiac or raft, you're right at the water. Water can change light conditions, and its movement can affect the photographer's ability to capture the image desired.

The photographer's ability to transmit the scale of the image is often impared in water shots as the frame of reference relevant to the photograph's viewer is missing or unfamiliar. In addition, the environment of being in a boat or on a ship can be hostile to your photographic equipment, and taking photographs.

Do filters for digital cameras make sense?

Before the advent of high quality digital cameras, professionals, and advanced amateur film photographers traditionally used filters to modify both the color and intensity of light exposing the film, as well as to generate special effects.

Digital cameras operate in a different world with respect to color. Photographers can easily modify color in their cameras, or during post processing in their computers, via controlling white balance for scene color accuracy or effect.

Warming, cooling, and filters which convert fluorescent light to look like daylight, may be required for film, but digital cameras can achieve the same effects by their internal manipulation of the image’s digital data.

The use of traditional photography filters for modifying the color of the light, is unnecessary for digital photography, but other filters can work well for digital photography.

Panorama Photography Part II

In Panorama Photography Part I, I discussed what panorama photographs are, and why they’re so appealing.

Now in Part II, I discuss techniques for taking photographs for panoramas created from multiple photographs, and stitched together into a single spectacular image.

There are three major rules of thumb to ensure your images can be successfully mated to make a panorama.

1. You need exposure consistency in your photographs to ensure colors match from photo to photo which make up your image. One of the most common problems in stitching photographs together is differences in the color of the sky, due to inconsistent exposures photo to photo.
2. You need to ensure there is enough information in adjacent photographs that they can be successfully “glued” together. This accomplished by photo overlap.
3. You need to eliminate image parallax so that there are no ghosts in your final image and that lines in the panorama are aligned and look normal.

Here are my major guidelines for taking photographs to use in creating multiple photo panoramas:

• Use a tripod to keep all your photos in the same horizontal plane.
• If your panorama contains parallel vertical or horizontal lines, such as when the panorama includes a fence or building facade it’s important that your lens’ pivot point, or entrance pupil (the optical center of the lens), not the camera, be located directly over the central axis of rotation of the panorama. It’s relatively easy to locate the entrance pupil of a prime, or zoom lens (each focal point). By rotating your camera/lens over the pivot point, the problem of parallax, where the photographer can’t align vertical and/or horizontal lines in pairs of photographs when stitched together disappears. Really Right Stuff, the manufacturer of my panorama head has an excellent tutorial about locating a lens’ pivot point to eliminate parallax. (Please note, that while Really Right Stuff continues to call the pivot point the “nodal point,” which is an incorrect use of terminology, their method of locating the pivot point is the best way I know of to quickly locate and set the pivot point.)
• You need to keep your exposure settings uniform throughout your images, so their brightness and color will mesh, photo to photo. You should scan the entire scene making note of the aperture and shutter speeds your camera is suggesting, then pick one pair of settings in the middle, or slightly darker to make sure any sky details are preserved and manually set it, so that the settings will remain the same for each photographic image used in the panorama.
• Amply overlap each of the images in your panorama. You wouldn’t have liked my photo of Monument Valley with a white bar in it because I failed to overlap each photo enough. I overlap by 30% each time. Some say 15% works just fine, but I prefer more. Increasing the amount of overlap helps reduce “flaring” that happens when the software is forced to use all of the image frame, including the corners which may show distortion depending on your lens choice.
• Look for movement in your overall scene. While movement in a scene can make it more interesting at times, too many or large blurry areas in your photos can ruin your final panorama. When overlapping images have items which don’t precisely match, you get a blur, which can ruin the shot. I try to take each of my multiple images quickly to avoid the problem of movement. By the way, I do realize that some movement is unavoidable. You just need to minimize it.
• Shooting with shorter focal length lenses more often than not introduces problems of lens distortion. When there is lens distortion the stitching between side by side images can be unnatural looking. Many wide angle lenses suffer from barrel distortion to varying degrees. You can avoid this problem merely by shooting with longer focal length lenses.
• You should also minimize the use of filters, to obtain exposure and white balance consistency between the photos which will make up the complete panorama. Polarizing filters, in particular, often darken the corners of your photographs. Depending on the angle of light to the filter they can create a significant variation in sky color from photo to photo in the panorama, preventing you from creating a combined image which looks as one. I never use polarizing filters when shooting panoramas. For that matter almost any filter can add some vignetting to your images, which interferes with good stitching and the final image, so I normally never use a filter on my lens other than the UV filter which I keep on all lenses to protect them.
• I normally turn off auto focus and preset my focus manually for the entire group of images which will comprise my final panorama photograph. Image size can change with focus shift. If that happens, it’s likely you’ll never be able to achieve a high quality alignment of your stitched photos which make up the overall panorama image.
• I manually set my white balance of my DSLR to eliminate color shift from photo to photo so they will seamlessly stitch together. This is especially important for landscapes showing substantial sky.

Good luck. Let me know if these guidelines help you put together your next panorama.