Thanks for the second place! Great comments on all the pics.

As soon as I saw Davids entry I thought it would be the winner, it's a great shot! looking forward to the next comp, but it's a hard one....

No, Richard, I never get tired of the view! In fact whewnever I get pissed off with work, the view is what reminds me how lucky I am not to be stuck in an office!

As for white balance, i-Berg, not tried anything excepet AWB, which obviously does not work with snow (in fact I made a huge correction on these shots), but I shoot in RAW so just need to find the optimum colour temperature I guess. It seems to vary. When I correct for the snow the rocks seem the wrong colour. It's a bit odd, as I never had this problem with my Olympus or my compact. The glass (3 layers of laminated glass)is supposed to be optically correct, but I wonder if the glass on the aircraft I am flying now does anything to the colour temperature, can't find anything in the manuals or on the net about it though.

Using a polariseer gives weird effects as the flight deck windows are polarised. i actually took a few rently with a polariser just to seee how they turned out : some very strange colours.

Lovely shot I prefer the processing of the first one too. Years ago I killed locusts for a living for a while I dont think this is one.

The colour of the copper is sumptious twoand three are my favouriteslovely shots.

Thanks for the comments.

The colour cast was a lot worse before I adjusted it in Lightroom., I used AWB which worked ok with these sort of scenes on my previous camera but was way out on these. As for lenses , I have the Sigma 10 to 20 but it is of limited use from the aircraft as it shrinks thinga a bit much. Ideally I would like a really good quality zoom from 16 to about 135 mm but don't know of any. Some quality is obviously lost by shooting through nearly an inch of glass but Boeing windows are optically not too bad and all the aircraft are new so the windows are not scratched yet.. However I think a really good lens may improve shots taken from the aircraft.

I was very lucky on this trip in that the skies were clear over Greenland and it was not too hazy though I had to tweak the contrast a fair bit. The sky in the second one was as it looks and I suspect much of it was pollution from North America carried there by upper air currents. Sad. There's a semi permanent huge brown cloud over the Indian Ocean just off the African coast too.

Any suggestions on lenses would be gratefully received it is a pain changing them and often the moment is missed. It would be great to have more range available on one good lens and I want to make the most of the photographic oppurtunities this job has given me even though it is quite rare to get clear hazeless skies while over something interesting. I spent too many years flying around with a compact!

Jon

A few taken from the office window yesterday. All taken with the 18-55WR, still wondering whether to get a new lens just for use on shots like these.
C&C welcome.

I like 1 and 3, especially 3

I really like the crop of the first one, the colours are lovely!

When i first got my K7, I played around with the in-camera HDR, but I have to say I did not persevere for long. I found quite a lot of fringing around high contrast edges, and, being a jpeg file, there's not much you can do about it in Photoshop without degrading the image. You also have no input to how the image will look after processing-it's just a case of pressing the button and seing what comes out. It did work a bit better at the weakest setting, but I have got much better results by taking bracketed RAW files and using Photomatix, where you can adjust the final image before it's processed. The in-camera HDR is a nice gimmick, but not much more than that. Saying that, it can sometimes give quite pleasing results with low contrast scenes.

When shooting for HDR, I tend to use five bracketed exposures one stop apart with the camera set to take the five shots on one press of the shutter. I then process it in Photomatix. The final picture being a 16-bit TIFF, there's also more latitude for tweaking the picture afterwards if I still am not happy with it.