The mountains along the western edge of Maui between Kihei and Lahaina.

Back Story

Although I have quite a few aerial shots from the doors-off helicopter tour from the Maui Photo Festival, this one was actually taken from the plane before we even landed on Maui in the first place.

Normally, I only have my smartphone camera or a point and shoot within reach while we’re sitting on the plane, but not this trip. No, thanks to my new camera backpack, I was able to stow my camera gear right at my feet and have my trusty Canon 5D Mark II right at my fingertips.

And although there’s still having to shoot through those dirty airplane windows, and the fact that there’s no room for a zoom lens (had my 24-105mm here, shot at about 58mm according to EXIF), I still it came out pretty well.

Oh, One More Thing…

For my helicopter shoots, I make sure to have a circular polarizer so that I account for the sun reflecting of the water below. That was my mindset here, too, but I was getting some bizarre color reflections from the plane window. It’s probably verifiable with a quick Google search, but my guess is that the window was already polarized or something like that, which meant I lost about 60 seconds of shooting while I had to take of the polarizer on my lens.

Live and learn, I guess.