My trip to Mallorca 2013

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

I just returned from my 10 day Mallorca visit over christmas.
I'm processing all the images now.
As a starter here is one from the flight.
Oh and yes - Happy New Year to everyone !


EDIT: Added 4 out of the window shots from my early morning flight to the island


Alps in early morning light #1




Alps in early morning light #2



Alps in early morning light #3




Alps in early morning light #4



Thrust

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

I just returned from my 10 day Mallorca visit over christmas...

...As a starter here is one from the flight.

Looks like Santa's cap, no? Are you sure it wasn't him, flying to deliver all his goods, tracked by NORAD and flanged by two F-16s?

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Looks like Santa's cap, no? Are you sure it wasn't him, flying to deliver all his goods, tracked by NORAD and flanged by two F-16s?

I must admit, now that you say it, I am not entirely sure ...

[ahbnyc]

I like the composition -- looks very abstract and would be hard (at least for me) to say what it was if your post didn't say.  Might be interesting to see what it looks like with the clouds cropped out.

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

I added 4 more images from the flight to my first post.
They were extremely difficult to process due to extreme blue light in 12.000 m flight height and extreme backlit morning lighting conditions (looking east more or less).
I decided to leave a residue of the color and not make them b/w.
Each image is sort of a different interpretation of the light and the extremes I had to tame in my postprocessing.
The whole series can be seen in larger size in a set I created on my flickr account here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/feldhaim/sets/72157639484479446

Cheers
~Chris

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

...  They were extremely difficult to process due to extreme blue light in 12.000 m flight height and extreme backlit morning lighting conditions...

Ctein, over at the Online Photographer, had an article recently on the subject of processing airplane photography:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/10/photographing-from-commercial-airplanes.html

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Ctein, over at the Online Photographer, had an article recently on the subject of processing airplane photography:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/10/photographing-from-commercial-airplanes.html

I checked the site, but had mixed feelings about Cteins ideas.
He had a good technical idea to sort of overcome some of the extreme color problems, but they don't seem to work in case of my images.
Since using electronic devices during start and landing is prohibited I had no chance to get a shot at any decent flight height.
I was allowed to start shooting at about 8,000 meters.
At this height there already is a gross loss of contrast and heavy blue color already along with the scattering problems he describes.
No way to get anything realistic at this height.
The landscape got interesting when we crossed the Alpes - we were at almost 12,000 meters flight height there.
At this height, together with the high mountains already being a color problem in themselves - even when at ground level (UV radiation) I had no chance to correct anything into the direction of realistic color.
After reading the article I tried and it simply didn't work well. The results were interesting in an artistic way, but in no way anything near realistic.
The Alps are at around 2000-4000 m which already is a special, UV contaminated  part of the atmosphere as well.
So my approach was different - I did some correction of the worst blue color cast along with the necessary extreme contrast and clarity corrections (Yes - here you need extreme clarity values here to get halfway decent microcontrast) and then I desaturated the color and left it muted. Some local dodging and burning and use of exposure gradients fixed some major problems and finally left me with the selection of the four images presented.
I didn't attempt to equalize their color temperature - instead I processed each image individually as being its own interpretation of the what I saw.
And since I like the muted spacey colors I decided not to convert them to black and white.

Cheers
~Chris