Interview: Aerial & skyline photographer Paul Seibert

Landscape photographer Paul Seibert is known for his spectacular aerial stills of city skylines. His series From the Air, which explores the deep socio-economic inequality within New York City, is currently showing at Brooklyn Bridge as part of Through a Circular Lens—a Photoville exhibition sponsored by MPB. This week, Paul spoke with Frederick Van Johnson at podcast This Week in Photo about shooting from the air without drones and his go-to kit for different times of day. Read an excerpt below or watch the interview.

Paul details his kit options while flying high over skyscrapers:

I am a Canon shooter, and so one of my bodies is the Canon EOS R5 and Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. And normally for daytime flights, I would say, unless something has happened to my lens, I’m 100% of the time shooting with a 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM and 70-200mm f/2.8 L USM. The 16-35mm to get those kinds of, if you’re looking out you’re seeing the panorama, the vistas, and how so much humanity, especially in New York is stuffed into this little neck, little island, and how it interacts with how it’s constricted naturally. That’s always interesting to me, I love that kind of combination of the natural world interacting with how Man has fit to make that work.

And then the 70-200mm is for those detail or compression shots. One of the great things about flying to New York City is that I get to see some of those architectural details that hardly anybody else gets a chance to see. So sharing that is always exciting to me because a lot of these crowns of these buildings are incredibly ornate, and so much thought and planning have gone into it, and if you’re just walking down the street, you keep it moving. But to see those finishing touches: the turrets, the crowns, little pergolas, or clock towers on top of these older buildings. The fun part is discovering something I haven’t seen before.

If it’s an evening flight I switch to primes because you’re in a moving aircraft, there are no tripods, I’m not shooting on a gimbal, it’s all handheld. So you want to get as much speed as you can out of your equipment to keep the digital noise down.