Once your airport is growing, you might want to begin to take pictures and share them on social media.

And even if you are already taking pictures, you would probably like to make them look as nice as possible.

Well, today I’m sharing some tips about that.

Let’s see first how to handle camera settings.

If you don’t have a camera, you can still use your smartphone to take great pictures, but this tutorial may not fit your needs.

1) Shutter aperture

If you have a camera, a good place to start is the “shutter aperture mode”, to control the background blur (the bokeh). The aperture is set by the F number : F2.8, F4, F16, F22,...

For those who don’t know, and as a reminder for the others :

The higher the “F”, the clearer the background, and the smaller the aperture.

The lower the “F”, the greater the background blur, and the bigger the aperture.

Example with F22 :

Example with F4 :

This is particularly interesting when you want to highlight a single subject.

If you want to feature a new plane, you might want to blur the background and use a low F.

If you want to display a whole picture of your airport, including details in the background, you may use this time a high F.

Generally speaking, the closer you are to a subject, the greater the background blur.

2) Telephoto

It can be interesting to use a telephoto lens to add a “lifelike” touch.

It will give the impression that you are far from the subject, and slightly break the scale effect.

When you zoom, it’s a good idea  to use a tripod to stabilize the camera, otherwise you might observe unintended motion blur.

Using a tripod is a good idea in any case! It will give you more control and give your photos more consistency.

2) Editing

Sometimes you get a great photo straight from the camera.

Sometimes you don’t! For those times, you can use an app like Snapseed.

It’s a free app to edit your photos and adjust everything, from the contrast to white balance and sharpness.

You can even make a double exposure and use a correction tool to erase any unwanted defects.

Of course, if you already have a favorite photo editing software like Photoshop, you can use that instead !

Hope this helped you,

Olivier