Photos

It was probably an hour and a half the plane has took-off from Ushuaia, when a turbulence stronger than the other made me lift the head from the book I was reading to give a glance through the window. And what an incredible view it was to see this nail clipping shape moon lost in the indigo blue sky just on the border between night and day. The incandescent clouds below reinforced the drama of this spectacle. The plane was flying to Buenos Aires and was following the Patagonian coast on the Atlantic side.

A little later, when the night was almost here, I witness a very confusing sight. On the left side of the aircraft, one could see hundreds of little white lights under the plane. We were flying over a thin layer of clouds; the lights were disappearing and reappearing, as we were moving. This really looked like a starry sky and gave us the feeling we were flying upside down. A fellow traveller, intrigued as I was asked the flight attendant about it and, if understood correctly what he said in Spanish, those were the lights of shrimps fishing boats sailing off the coast of Argentina. There were hundreds of them scattered over the ocean.

Even though I was sure I wouldn?t get a satisfying result, I took this picture to finish the few shots that was left on the roll I had in my camera. I?ve disabled all the automatisms and the auto focus of my camera. I?ve opened the aperture to the maximum (2.8) and set the speed to 1/60. Even though this speed was too slow for the light available, I choose it to avoid blurring the picture by moving the camera. While taking the picture, I covered the camera and myself with my jacket to avoid the cabin?s light reflections on the glass. I also avoided the lens to touch the window so the plane vibration wouldn?t be transmitted to the camera. The resulting picture was underexposed and quite grainy with an orange cast.

I?ve reduced the noise with NeatImage. I?ve corrected the exposure with levels, balanced the colours with curves and increased the blue and red saturation with Photoshop.