THIS IS A PLACE HOLDER BTW
Night Spotting Notes 12/20/2024
It’s the end of the first semester of Senior year and I’m celebrating it with a planespotting trip to LAX. This time I went with my friends (shoutout to Thomas and Kevin!!!). This is my first time doing night-planespotting with a tripod.
The rays from lights on the planes in the dark mesmerize me… It looks gorgeous. To record the beauty is not easy. The low-light environment and the fast-moving nature of the aircraft made it impossible to capture clear shots without moving the camera with the plane. But this is not easy, so some of my shots looked like this:
So after missing many shots, I figured out that the only way to be constant with the plane’s speed is to lock the y-axis of the tripod so there are fewer unconstant movements to worry about. I also turned on burst mode, so I could hold the shutter while panning along the plane, eliminating another unpredictable force on the camera. I got some good shots from shooting this way.
The thrill starts with changing from shooting moving planes to stills. Since I have no idea how long the plane will be stationary and how many long exposure shots I need to get a good photo, I need to save every second I have. I have to set the correct mode, ISO, shutter speed, and aperture as quickly as I can to efficiently use my time. Some of the pictures shot using this mode are stunning.
Since most of the moving pictures were taken with high ISO (like 12800), denoising became necessary. Lightroom’s new AI denoising feature handles the noise very well. After denoising, I’ll adjust the exposure and color balance to make it look nicer before exporting to Photoshop. I then use the Topaz Photo AI to sharpen the picture. The final results look a lot better than the raw image.
Anyway planespotting at night is fun. It’s unpredictable and rewarding at the same time!