Shooting from a chopper
By Derek Wiebenson
7 Aug 2009
The lens caps stayed in the car because I was about to fly through the air at 100 mph and 500 feet up. With no doors, if I dropped one, it was gone forever.
I was about to embark on my first helicopter ride with Stuart Matsumoto of Metro Helicopters in Marshfield, Massachusetts (just north of Cape Cod). Not only did his web site (R44pilot.com) advertise aerial photography, but one of his first questions was if I wanted to have the doors off during the flight (darn right I did!). He would go up for as long as I wanted -- at $8.50 a minute I would need to limit the length of our flight for sure.
I booked the chopper to take off two hours before sunset. This would ensure late afternoon light, which provides an attractive golden hue and the shadows show depth in photo subjects even with the lens pointing straight down.
For equipment, I brought my Nikon D700. The D700 gives plenty of detail and dynamic range (RAW is a must; it was not practical to use a gradient filter and the sky to ground exposure difference is huge so that I ended up using Lightroom's gradient filter feature on most images).
As a RAW shot is about 15MB, I packed four 4GB cards and a couple of 1GB cards in case I shot much faster than anticipated. It would be difficult to change lenses, so I kept my equipment to a minimum with a Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8 and 80-200mm f/2.8. These lenses covered a huge range and the large glass would let me keep the shutter speed high.
At the airport, Stuart asked me where I wanted to shoot and whether the images would be for publication. I wasn't sure about the publication, so I answered 'no.' The correct answer turned out to be 'yes,' since the FAA limits non-commercial flights to 25 miles. I back-pedaled when I heard this, since one of my shots was outside that range and who knows, why shouldn't get the images be published!
When it was time to load in, I did something that conflicted with the minimal web-based input I had gathered -- I left on the lens hood for my 24-70mm (the 80-200mm doesn't really need one and the 14-24mm has one fixed in place). The online folks suggested not using a hood because holding it out the door opening at 100 mph can rip it off the camera. I decided to take the risk given how clear the sky was and how likely it was that the sun would come into the lens at odd angles. For the same reason, I removed all UV filters to minimize the reflections of the sun. In 20/20 hindsight, the UV filters might have helped with the haze towards the end of the flight, but I did take a number of shots almost directly into the sun with nearly zero artifacts.
As soon was we were underway, it became clear that I would use all 16GB in memory cards. I was shooting at 5 frames per second and everything looked so amazing. I was completely overwhelmed at the views and sights.
I also discovered that I had to dial down the exposure compensation at least a full stop. With the ocean and forests being so dark, the sunlit boats and houses were comparatively overexposed. I set the Auto-ISO to never take a shot under 1/400s. This wasn't even fast enough at all cases. When we arrived at spots of interest, I could ask Stuart to bank or circle, but if we were cruising at 100 MPH it required speeds of 1/1000s or more could capture the speeding landscape.
Stuart was a photographer's pilot. His helicopter was outfitted with Bose noise canceling headphones that made conversation easy, and as we circled any points of interest, he would let me know where he was going next so I could anticipate the shift in light and angle. He has done many aerial photo-shoots, mostly with professionals and occasionally for motion picture companies. He took me to several area 'must haves' such as the Plymouth lighthouse. Sometimes his experience with more touristy customers came out, as when we circled Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower replica. His piloting around the Bourne Bridge and Cape Cod Canal train bridge was excellent -- he even gave the Otis Air Guard Base a heads-up that we would be flying into their airspace.
As we zoomed around, occasionally making a hard turn to enable me to shoot straight down (awesome!), I found the 80-200mm had limited use -- I only took about 10% of the shots with it. It's usefulness was either in really isolating an object (e.g. lighthouse, single boat) or showing the perspective looking down the length of a spit or beach. The wide angle, the 14-24mm, was much better for capturing a large bridge or a broad swath of urban sprawl. Even that lens only served about 20% of my shots. The real workhorse was the 24-70mm. The ability to go wide or tighten down was about perfect; the D700 is a full frame sensor so 24mm is pretty wide. When I stuck it out into the air flow, the lens hood held tight, although the whole camera would shake (lesson learned, stay inside the cabin).
What would I do differently next time? I would keep our geographic range much tighter. It was a great first experience to zoom across Cape Cod at sunset, but photographically, it would have been better to focus on just a few subjects. I also had a problem with the memory cards -- I didn't use exclusively high write speed cards and I ended up filling the D700's buffer, stopping the shutter. High speed cards cost far less than a D3 so next time I would be sure to pack some Extreme IVs. However, given that I took close to 1000 photos, averaging over 15 a minute, maybe it was okay that I was occasionally forced to stop and look out into the open air with my bare eyes to watch the world passing by at 100 mph.
4 responses
-
Cody Goddard said (8 Aug 2009):
Great article!
-
Frank McMains said (14 Aug 2009):
Good information, I have only shot from a helicopter once (and it was at night) but I did a shoot from a hot air balloon last week and it presented some of the same problems. I was worried that going wide would loose any interesting detail but I mainly used my 28mm in the balloon. I had a tilt shift for the night flight and it created an interesting effect of a baseball stadium at night but I would not rely on it too much in the future. Again, thanks for the insight.
-
Danne Dhirgahayu said (19 Aug 2009):
wow...remind me of vincent laforet's photo of new york city...nice ones!!!
-
Zerina Phillip gave props (9 Sep 2009):
vote. Wonder story. Great photos
More How To Stories
THE TOUCH - the revolution in digital photography
By Holger E. Dunckel — 22 Dec 2009
Press-information about an exhibition I had in september 2009 in Ibiza ...
