Back in February, NASA finally allowed astronauts to start taking their personal camera phones into space. Since then, we’ve been seeing all sorts of amazing images – especially taken in portrait orientation.
The latest of these comes from Anil Menon, a flight engineer part of NASA Expedition 75, who snapped a fantastic frame looking into the eye of Super Typhoon Dolphin as it swirled above the Northwest Pacific Ocean.
While Menon isn’t necessarily a photography specialist, he seems to have a good eye for working out the visual weight of an image and dedicating the right amount of space to elements in the frame.
I think he gets this spot on by affording the top half of the frame to the typhoon and almost the entire bottom half to the International Space Station (ISS). He leaves a sliver of the dark expanse of space between these elements, which gives the image some breathing room, but also adds to the “awe factor”.
While I think this composition could also have turned out great if taken in landscape orientation, it’s the vertical framing that makes it work so well for me.
Menon blasted into space on July 14 2026 and is expected to remain aboard the ISS until spring 2027, where he is helping to research bioprinting human tissues and cells, and using artificial intelligence for crew health monitoring.
He joined European Space Agency astronauts who were already aboard the ISS including Sophie Adenot, herself an avid photographer with a stellar portfolio of images from her current stint in space.
Like Adenot, Menon has been active on social media (via NASA HQ) and has already posted many clips and images of the crew and their extraordinary views from orbit. And while a lot of his content has been captured in landscape mode, it’s the portrait frames that tend to catch my eye first.
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