How to Photograph a Craft From Your Cabin Window

Every cabin window is a bad angle until it isn't. Here's how to be ready when it isn't.

Cabin windows are small, curved, and usually fogged from a pressure differential nobody's fully solved, which makes them a genuinely terrible place to take a photograph. They're also where most of our travelers' best photographs happen, because that's where the sightings occur.

Manual focus, always. Autofocus hunts for something to lock onto against open space or a dark shoreline and usually finds nothing, right when you need the shot most. Pre-focus on the horizon or the nearest fixed structure and leave it there.

A fast shutter speed matters more than a wide aperture. Whatever you're photographing through that window is very likely moving, and a blurred smear is a much harder sell to skeptical friends back home than a sharp, small, genuinely strange shape.

Keep the camera within reach at all times, not stowed. I've missed more shots to a gear bag zipper than to bad conditions. Every guide on every trip will tell you the same thing: the sighting does not wait for you to find your camera.

And when you do get the shot — and you will, more often on our routes than most people expect — send us a copy. We keep an archive. It's a good archive.