Jorge Quinteros

Flight Over Washington

The feeling of paranoia in seeing a sunset is not nearly as high as it use to be when I first started photographing because back then, the impression was that no decent photographs can ever be taken once that bright light in the sky settled.

Of course that’s not true and if capturing landscapes is your specialty, there’s no better moment than sticking around for the gold hours of dawn and dusk which happen to fall upon us as we walked back to our car after a long exhausting day of walking around Washington. When you find yourself by the Lincoln Memorial, the opportunity to capture an airplane in flight is guaranteed because the airport is apparently close to all the major landmarks.

Serenity in the Sky

The airplane-taking portion of any trip is the least of my anticipations when traveling. I don’t have a phobia towards flying itself but more of a distaste to the boredom that characterizes being in a small confine space for hours.

Normally decent food and a killer movie makes up for that dullness but if those two amenities fail, I always have my laptop and snuck-in-food to compensate for expectations that I know are never going to be met. Any experience on an airplane is not what it use to be. Soon we’ll be charged for going to the restroom and if they ever do, I’ll still won’t hesitate in using my camera to photograph beautiful tranquil moments like this.

Gazing at this strongly accentuates my never ending fascination with continuing to fly in years to come and capturing moments to better remember each location. Photograph taken with the iPhone 4.

Dusk at the Beach

I’ve taken my fair share of sunset photographs during each travel and the one common denominator among each photo op has been that the best ones have resulted through repetition over the span of 30 minutes. By composing at least 50 shots, you have a better chance of being pleased with at least 5 or 10 out of all of them.

The trick is to try to predict a sunset before it happens and the photographs you’ll be more impressed with will be the ones where the sun has already settled below the horizon. With the Canon SD1100 protected in the underwater housing, I took this photograph on our last day of our family vacation in El Salvador.

Sea Window

I’ve embarked on my fair share of cruise vacations in the past 3 years that in any ocassion you’ll notice more than one brochure laying on our coffee table. It’s become the ideal form of traveling for my wife and I because of the sheer amount of locations and cultures you’re destined to experience on one single shot.

The ships are becoming bigger, more popular and the destinations more exotic than ever. Having just returned from a full day of exploring Cozumel, I snuck away with my camera using the Nikkor Fisheye 10.5mm f/2.8  before heading to dinner and snapped this photograph as the sun was setting. I can’t recall a time I didn’t rent a lens to take with me on vacation. It’s the best alternative to paying a huge amount for a lens that you want badly but don’t want to invest in yet.