Aerial Photography

Fixed-Wing or Not
This is the choice between an airplane and a helicopter. If you do casual aerial photography anything will work, even a commercial airliner. For serious aerial photography the fixed-wing aircraft can have certain drawbacks depending on what you shoot. Struts, wings, air surfaces often get in the way. Here are a couple things to consider:

Aircraft
Pros:
• Often available
• Often inexpensive (sometimes just pay for gas)
• Easy to borrow/rent

Cons:
• Need an airstrip/airport to land and take off
• Cannot fly lower than 1000’ above congested areas
• Cannot fly lower than 500’ above a person, structure or vessel
• Cannot be flown slowly (at least not without crashing) typical passenger plane is unsafe below 80mph
• Cannot fly with the door removed unless allowed (look for open window options) skydiving aircraft are great
• Difficult to shoot straight-down (you need to bank and turn to do so)

Helicopters
Pros:
• Takeoff/land virtually anywhere
• Hover virtually anywhere (though slow circles are safer)
• Fly slow, close and low to subjects you are shooting
• Fly with the door off easily (this is often key) but will slow down your maximum travel speed

Cons:
• Expensive (I have paid $450/hr) but for that rate you only pay for time actually in the air and they will refuel you anywhere you go. Rentals can be between $225 to $1000 per air hour depending on the ship and company.
• Big people, lots of people, lots of gear, need bigger helis
• If you shoot up, or very wide, rotors will be in shots
• Pretty easy to avoid, but the landing skids on most helis can show in you wide shots if you are not careful

Hot Air Balloons
Pros:
• Relatively cheap, and can even be free if you help with setup and packup
• Fly very slow and steady
• Peaceful and no motion/rotor sickness

Cons:
• Only available in certain areas (no high winds)
• General “flat land” travel
• Only take off when air temps are low enough to provide enough hot air lift
• You are at the mercy of the winds and conditions
• Not likely something you are going to do for 20 min

Kites
Pros:
• Very cheap
• Very available
• You control the altitude

Cons:
• Requires steady wind (gusts or stalls don’t help you)
• Can only lift so much camera weight, so less camera or bigger kite
• Many people have crashed their cameras to the ground
• Difficult to control exactly what you get in the outcome and the timing

Other options
• Towed glider – but you must shoot through the canopy unless it has a port for lens to peer out of
• Paraglider/ultralight – some awesome photos can be taken this way, but you better know what you are doing
• Commercial aircraft – get a window seat, not over a wing, hopefully get a clean window, don’t use a polarizer
• Remote-control helis, planes, blimps – expensive and technical – limited range

Best time of day
I like mornings because the light rays are long, haze is less and the landscape is fresh. Last hours of the day can be great too. Just watch for distance haze as it limits options for great photos as it builds up throughout the day. Landscapes look pretty flat, especially in flat light, so unless that is your goal, mid-day is not the best. Thermals and winds often increase as the day progresses too.

Planning
Tell your pilot the total weight of you, your gear and your assistant if you have one; or your entire party if more than you. Bush planes like in Alaska will weigh everything and everybody will know what you weigh. All part of a safe experience. Bring too much? You aint going. Not all aircraft will suit your needs.
Most aircraft do not have windows that open. Shooting through the plastic windshield, side windows and such is not ideal. If you have to shoot through the plastic windows, do it so that direct sunlight is not hitting the window you are shooting out of. Best method is listed below under “Door off photography”. Polarizer is also generally useless through these windows as you end up with nasty color from polarized light through a polarizer = rainbow colors in the window.

Finding Locations
Know where you are going. Check Google Earth first, even print it out and discuss it with the pilot. When at altitude the subjects get pretty small and blend in. Know where your intended subject is in relation to larger objects you can easily identify. If you are just flying around looking for subjects, keep track of the time you are spending doing so.

Gear Selection
Only bring what you need. Excess gear just gets in the way and is not the time to bring everything you own. So what do you need? I would never go on an aerial mission without a blower, gaffer’s tape, lens cloth, big enough memory cars, charged batteries, etc.

Safety
Keep your gear from bouncing around inside the aircraft. If things get turbulent you don’t want your gear to interfere with the operation of the aircraft. Buckle yourself in and practice shooting from the aircraft before you take off. Nothing worse that being at altitude and find out you cannot get the shots you wanted because you did not practice.

Camera Settings for subject matter
Keep your shutter speed high as you are constantly moving. If your shutter speed is above 1/500 you do not need image stabilization unless your telephoto is pretty long. IS/VR lenses will help here. For VR lenses, switch the VR mode to “Active” for best results. Depth of field rarely matters because you are generally pretty far away from your subject and everything will be in focus.

Reducing haze
Shoot in the morning when there is less particulate matter in the air. Shoot with a polarizer and dial in a setting that really reduces the haze. Polarizer through many aircraft windows results in re-polarized light and nasty rainbow colors across you images. UV filters will help some at altitude but the low-pass filter in your dSLR also does some.

Motion sickness
This is very common. Plan accordingly. Some never suffer from it, some pilots even do. Don’t stare at the spinning rotor/prop unless it does not bother you. Just different speeds of each can cause air sickness when it has not before.
Dramamine helps some people, doctors can give you another choice. Spewing inside the aircraft is not a welcome option for anybody involved. Plan accordingly and if you have to throw up, do it inside something you brought (or inside your bag, clothes, whatever). In helis sometimes can land quickly and give you a break, but other aircraft, you are kind of stuck.
Think you are fine and don’t get sick while flying commercially? Try a small plane, flopping around over recently burned ground in the middle of a summer day while looking through a viewfinder. That can introduce it. Plus you are in a confined space with little air movement usually. Temperature control is often not available. What helps me the most is air movement, especially across the face when I start to feel queasy.
If you get queasy in a helicopter, they will just set it down somewhere until you feel better. In an airplane you are pretty much stuck until the flight ends.

Door-off photography
This is the very best method for control over the results of your photography. Problem is many pilots have never flown with a door off. It is actually a pretty common practice with helicopters. When shooting with the door off you have much more freedom to point your lens at things, but keep these things in mind:
When the door is off, air will be blowing around inside the cabin. Anything light and loose could be blown out, so secure it! Secure your camera(s) to a tether, so if you drop one, it will not fall out the open door. Do not change lenses in flight, bring spare bodies and pre-mount your lenses. Gaffer tape lens hoods onto the lens body to keep them from coming off in flight (if you use them). Use a seat belt extension to give yourself more room to maneuver. Adjusting seat belts with the door off is a dangerous idea. Harness yourself so that you cannot become a liability.

My experience
I am not a pilot and I do not play one on TV. I am just like many of you, but with the fortune of having done this quite a few times. I have rented helicopters a dozen times shooting mainly video footage. Used to rent a “Tyler Mount” that mounts to the nose of a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter giving you internal controls over the video camera mounted to the nose. I have also shot video and photography from the helicopters with the door off and without the option of having the door off. Even getting a seat belt extension and putting one foot on the skid and half my body outside the doorway to get the shots.
I have shot 8 years for my own video production company, hired by the U.S.D.A Forest Service during the 1994 fire storm season and more recently have shot from aircraft for my day job. The faster the aircraft goes, the more you have to think ahead.

Tips
• Dress for the weather at the altitude and wind speeds you will experience – it can be cold up there
• Even a P&S digital can be used and the lens can be poked out small window openings for decent shots
• If your cameras are out in the wind, they can get a stray bug on the lens. This happened to me at 8,000 feet once and a bug smacked right in the middle of the 125mm polarizer. Pack cleaning things as needed if this happens.
• If the door is not off, you can use the headset/mic to communicate with the pilot
• If the door is off, plug in the headset, but not the mic connection. Otherwise the pilot has full-time wind noise in his ear. Use hand signals and head movements to communicate instead. You can still hear the pilot.
• Super-wide angle lenses to 70-200mm telephoto are very common for such flights
• Know and understand any charges incurred in your flight needs & flight plan
• Image stabilized lenses provide a benefit; use “active” mode if your lens has it as you, the aircraft and the lens are all moving around
• Very long telephotos are difficult – if you use one, keep your shutter speeds pretty high