This week’s PotW is of a familiar location: Dallas, Texas. However, it’s from a completely different perspective than I’ve shown you before.
There’s a fantastic outfit headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, called Epic Helicopters. They specialize in helicopter tours of the Dallas and Fort Worth areas. They have two takeoff points to cover both Dallas and Fort Worth, and I finally had the chance to go up with them (they were running a great special). A nighttime tour of Dallas was incredible. Not only did I see Christmas lights from the air, but the views of downtown Dallas and its iconic buildings was second to none. Here was one of my favorites, and I’ll be sure to do a complete post soon about the entire experience.
Dallas at night, by Andy Luten
For the photographers: this was tough. The doors were on the heli, it was bumpy, and I had no idea what I was doing. My Sony a7 does really well in low-light (not as well as the a7s of course), so I went ahead and ramped the ISO up to 6400. At f1.8 on my 55mm prime, it meant I could get the shutter speed to 1/250th of a second, which ended up being the magic formula. This is one time I was particularly thankful for all 24 megapixels on the a7 as it left me lots of room to crop in a good composition. This is about as edited as it gets in Lightroom with sliders going all over the place, but I like how it turned out.
